After birth, she was transferred to our hospital because the other hospital's pediatric/neonatal GI surgeon was deployed. Surgery cleaned up her gut and the Dr. created an ileostomy. Essentially this means that her intestines are pulled to the abdomen and allowed to protrude through the skin and stool collects in a bag around it, allowing the gut below to rest.
The surgeon saw the baby on Wednesday and said the she is ready for her intestines to be reconnected. Yay! However, the surgeon is going on a 3 week vacation and won't be able to perform the surgery for a MONTH. And the surgeon really doesn't want another doctor to do it.
Ridiculous! Why should that family, and our government be paying for a one month extension to that baby's hospital stay just to please the doctor? We're talking tens of thousands of dollars, not to mention the emotional impact to the family, just waiting and waiting while their daughter continues to be in the hospital.
Being night shift, I couldn't really do anything to remedy the situation, but I told Mom we'd get it all resolved. Day shift fully agreed with me and said she'd take care of it. And I fully believe that she did. I am off for the next 6 nights, but hopefully next week when I go in, she'll be reconnected or have been transferred back to the original hospital since their surgeon is back from deployment.
I really do love my job, but sometimes the politics and bureaucracy really just bugs me.
2 comments:
Ridiculous. No doubt about it. NICU stays are very expensive, and she obviously has no reason that she needs to stay. Either put her back together, let her recover and send her home or discharge her now, let her parents learn how to do ostomy care and bring her back for surgery...Option 1 sounds better to me but we're just nurses. What do we know.
I doubt it's just to 'please the doctor.' If he's the only one of his kind at this hospital, the man probably works an insane amount of hours and maybe this is a rare vacation where he actually had time for once planned with his family?
And quite possibly there isn't a replacement around at that hospital that he either trusts with the surgery (or can even do it, as often happens when you get down to sub-sub-specialties), or more importantly, he trusts to manage the post op complications, which are more often the issues with these NICU babies as I'm sure you've seen. So he probably can't just hook her back up and run...which seems the simple answer.
I don't know all the details, but think about it from more than just one side. I doubt it's pleasing him knowing this baby is dealing with this while he's gone. But maybe he has a wife who will kill him if he misses yet another vacation...like he probably had to in his estimated near 10 years of training?....
Maybe transfer to another hospital? I don't know the right answer, but it's not a simple one.
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