6: A Case of Lupus - Morton Hospital Perspective

It's funny how, if you wait long enough, the idiots will hang themselves. I have not provided an update on Pam and her lupus in a long time, not since Lahey. There has been sooooo much more since then. Funny thing about Lahey though... you might call it ironic. There was a social worker who came in during Pam's stay at Lahey (there was only one stay there). Her name was Laney, and when I saw it I remembered babysitting a little girl in Gulf Breeze, FL with the same name and same spelling. I discounted it as pure coincidence. The last name was different and surely this was not the same little girl as a grown woman. Then one day I was looking through Facebook and looked up Laney. Come to find out she relocated up here and was affiliated with Lahey Clinic. I came across the little girl I had babysat as a child during Pam's Lahey ordeal!! Too ironic! Anyway, like I said that was long ago. Let me try to bring things up to date.

Well, Pam kept going to her old rheumatologist back in Brockton. One day he had the audacity to suggest to her that if "I" had not stopped her from getting Rituxan, her lupus would have been cured by then!!! Ummm, wait!!! Urrrrr!!!! Screeccchhhh!!! There was so much wrong with that statement. First off, I was not the reason Pam did not go through with the clinical trial of Rituxan. She had gone to Massarotti, as you may recall from the prior story, and Massarotti said she was doing too good to be part of the clinical trial. Massarotti actually suggested Pam cutting back on her prednisone thereby causing a relapse which would then qualify her for the clinical trial. Pam decided on her own not to go that route. By the way, isn't that highly unethical of the doctor to suggest? (I asked that before, I know.) The second issue was, Pam forwarded me an article the week after the rheumatologist told her that I was the reason Pam was not over her lupus. The article Pam forwarded me was from the lupus foundation and it said that Rituxan had failed the clinical trials for lupus treatment. http://lupus.about.com/b/2008/04/30/rituxan-fails-as-lupus-treatment.htm Too bad he did not know when he was telling Pam she would have been cured if she had undergone the Rituxan treatment that it was going to be announced the following week that it FAILED in the clinical trials!!! So where does he get off telling MY daughter that she would be cured of her lupus if it were not for me stopping her from going through the Rituxan treatments? My daughter makes her own informed decisions... I just made sure she was informed.

Anyway, while the Brockton doctor was blaming me for convincing Pam she would be cured had she gone through with the Rituxan, he also told her that she needed to be followed closer to home and pushed her into using Dr. Don L. Goldenberg out of the Newton-Wellesley Hospital. As his story went, Goldenberg was a "world-renowned specialist in Lupus". Ummm, yeah!

During Pam’s stay at Morton Hospital, it seemed like the quietest hospital stay ever. Students were not coming in and even the doctors hardly made an appearance. At least not during the day. Early on during her stay I did not spend the night and left her alone thinking it was so quiet that she would be okay. However, at 1:30 AM two nurses woke her from a sound sleep to give her a shower!!! The nurses said that was a good time because it was not busy. When I said something to her evening nurse about it, she did not even know the two nurses who had awakened Pam for a shower at 1:30 am yet their shifts would have overlapped by half an hour. This nurse I was asking had been there for years. Hmmmm.... weirdness. After that I was back to spending the night to make sure they did not do stupid crap like that again.

When Pam left Morton Hospital she later discovered she had acquired MRSA during her stay there. So guess what? Two weeks later she was back in the hospital!!! Hmmmm....

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