The Glade 4.0

So my mom has lymphoma. There are several different kinds of lymphoma which at the top level are hodgkins and non-hodgkins). Below non-hodgkins (the type my mom has) are different types that are significantly different in behavior and treatment. My mom has had the least aggressive type. It is considered not curable and doesn't really go into remission. You just keep it at bay until the treatments stop working and then you die. Good news is you can keep it at bay a while (decade) and there are new treatments developed all the time that can extend that.
Other types of lymphoma are extremely aggressive. Essentially it is a knock down drag out fight, and if you survive it, there's a good shot of remission.

Well now some of the tumors she has have morphed into the extremely aggressive kind. So now she going on full-fledged knock you on your *** chemo. That may or may not work, but even if it does the slow growing kind is not going to go away, and now it will be resistant to the strong chemo.

So best case scenario is that the aggressive chemo is defeated, but in doing so all the weapons will be used up to fight the slow growing kind and her life will be shortened by several years. Worst case is the strong chemo is ineffective against the strong chemo and she's dead in 6 months.

Very sorry Aegnor That's heavy

So sorry to hear this Aegnor. My thoughts are with you and your mother.

/hugs

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"Said I never had much use for one, never said I didn't know how to use one!"~ Matthew Quigley

"nothing like a little meow in bed at night" ~ Bruskey

"I gotta float my stick same as you" Hondo Lane

"Fill your hand you son of a *****!"

Life is not fair.

It is something I've come to accept.

Good luck to your mother, may she live with as little pain as possible for the time she has left.

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

What Mike said...

Good luck sir.

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Raell Kromwell

Have faith, Aethien. Have faith.

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I'm so sorry man. That's really tough.

So my mom gets a bladder infection, and since she's in the middle of chemo and her white blood cell count is low it makes it harder to fight off the infection. She goes to Urgent care and they test her, send the results to her urologist. He prescribes cipro (sp?) which she is nearly completely resistant to.

She calls her urologist to tell him that, and that the infection is getting worse. The nurse refuses to let her talk to the urologist and tells her it just takes a few days for the medicine to take effect and to just wait it out. Would not let her talk to the urologist.

The next day she passes out at the oncologist's office is taken to the ICU with sepsis and almost dies. The crisis is over for now. She is out of the ICU and is recovering.

I don't know whether it is malpractice or not, but I am so pissed at the nurse and the urologist.

I would be pissed at the nurse for not letting her or you speak to the doctor, and if I was in your shoes I'd be calling the doctor day and night until he/she did something.

I was just talking to a guildmate in EQ. He just found out his sister has thyroid cancer. It reminded me of my mother. She kept telling her doctor about the pains she was having. Her doctor said it's all in your head and sent her to a psychiatrist who put her on drugs for depression and who knows what else. By the time they figured out it was liver cancer it was too late. She died in 1989 at age 56.

Don't stop trying until you get someone that can and will do something for your mom...I wish I had the knowledge at the time to do the same for my mom.

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"Said I never had much use for one, never said I didn't know how to use one!"~ Matthew Quigley

"nothing like a little meow in bed at night" ~ Bruskey

"I gotta float my stick same as you" Hondo Lane

"Fill your hand you son of a *****!"

So, how big of a struggle do you want?

Advice below with caveat: I am not an attorney.

If you don't care to fight some, call the office. Request to speak to the office manager. Tell them you have a compliance concern that needs dealt with immediately.

Manager may or may not come to the phone, may be busy, etc. Regardless, whenever you do finally talk to the manager, calmly and politely explain the story. Explain that you believe the nurse to have been willfully negligent, and that you'd like an explanation of the practice's call back policies for the physician (because I guarantee that unless you're paying for concierge medicine, the urologist wasn't going to personally take the call, but would instead have called you back). Let the manager explain the policy.

If the policy 1) doesn't exist, or 2) gives nurses the authority to make decisions on their own as to whether to escalate to a physician (or to a mid-level provider such as an Nurse Practitioner or Physician Assistant), politely thank them and decide if you want to contact an attorney for negligent policies.

If the policy exists, doesn't give nurses the authority to make those decisions (and thus the nurse violated it), ask the practice manager for specifics on how they're going to discipline the nurse, and how they're going to follow up with you regarding that discipline. If she says they won't do so, let them know that you'll be contacting 1) your attorney, 2) the state nursing board, 3) the state physician's organization, unless they will discipline the nurse for violation of policy.

You will likely stir up a **** storm in doing any of this, but nurses can't make physician level decisions, it's against their licensure laws to do so. Violating a policy is negligence, doing so willfully is gross negligence. So either way, somebody has done something wrong. All your phone call is trying to determine is who.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

Regardless of specific licensing laws or policy in effect - the employer is responsible for the actions of the employee while operating as a representative of the business.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

So my mom got some good news on Friday, but it came with a hell of a decision to make. She saw a bone marrow transplant specialist. He told her that she was a good candidate for a bone marrow transplant. Here comes the decision though.

1) Remove some of her bone marrow, hit her with the chemo, transplant her bone marrow back. Mortality rate is about 5% from the procedure. It would very likely knock out the aggressive lymphoma. The indolent lymphoma would be knocked back, but would slowly grow back and eventually kill her.

2) Get a bone marrow transplant from one of her siblings (she has many). It would knock out the aggressive lymphoma and would likely knock out the indolent lymphoma too. The procedure has a mortality rate of 25%. Essentially if your body doesn't accept the transplant, or visa-versa, you're dead.