Friday, May 10, 2013

Oh Brother

We do medical screenings for the geriatric psychiatric unit of our hospital.  They come to the ED and we do some labs, a chest Xray and an EKG to make sure they're healthy enough to be admitted and loaded up on psychotropics.

A while back I got a lady I'd seen for the same thing about 3 months ago.  In her 70's, she reminded me of Eve Arden.  Tall and slender with brown doe eyes and those big, rubbery lips and a voice like  Southern accented honey-puddles.  There's something regal about her and you can tell she's always had good sense and plenty of money.  But not too much.  She's what they refer to here as good people, and I liked her immediately.

This day she was here to be medically cleared for admission to the geriatric psych unit, same as last time.  As we began to talk in the triage area, her story jarred my memory and I recalled the previous fiasco.

Her much younger brother and even younger sister-in-law were behind the previous admission, as were they this day.  When I saw her in June, she had just been diagnosed with colon cancer and was scheduled to begin chemotherapy in 3 days.  But her brother brought her to the Emergency Room and requested she be admitted to the geriatric psych unit due to an episode of  "thinking people are after her" and oddly, for a specified period of two weeks. 

We are guilty of being led down the garden path on these cases, more often than we probably want to admit and this patient was medically cleared and sentenced to a psych admission.  When she realized what was going on, she became hysterical.

"I'll miss my first chemo appointment," Big tears filled in her eyes.  "How can he do this to me?  What did I do to him?  I've tried to help him and (Mrs. Brother) and all they want to do is put me away."  She then went on to tell me she knew they were trying to get money from her but this new twist had taken on a serious tone.  "Are they trying to kill me for my money?  I'll be dead in a year, can't they wait that long?"

You know, sometimes these people aren't really crazy and the longer I sat in her room listening to her talk, the more I became convinced she was as sane as the rest of us.

Long story short, she got to go home in time for her first chemo treatment.  But now she was back.  The brother and his wife hadn't given up since the last time and the plot had become considerably thicker to the point of the patient having lost control of most of her money and now, it would seem, the brother/wife team had their eye on her home and property.  She had been forced to sell a peice of artwork the brother was unaware of, in order for her to buy gas to travel, on the days she didn't take chemo, driving herself to a town 60 miles away where she underwent voluntary psychological testing and paid a lawyer to document the findings in her defense for when this particular day arrived.

The day was here and the family had called the police to bring the frail, sweet old woman to the emergency room and drop her off for admission to the psych unit, again at which point, they planned to swoop in for the kill and finish up the leftovers.  And this time she was wasn't taking it lying down.  She was ready for a fight.

Without going into the details, she finally agreed to admission once convinced that it was in her best interest as a defense and that from that vantage point, the brother and his wife might be, for once, exposed for what they were.  And that's exactly what happened.  I took her case under my wing as did about a dozen others.  That night there happened to be a board meeting and the attorney representing the hospital was even summoned in for an opinion.  I personally called her own attorney, having previous positive interaction with him over some office space rental, and was assured she would be looked out for.  The staff in the psych unit, social workers, nurses, admitting psychiatrist, were all rallying for her and a snare was placed.  When the evil brother and wife showed up at the psych unit the next day, Saturday, to get the patient's purse, they were shut off at the pass by an innocent-appearing but fiery charge nurse who wasn't about to turn over the woman's handbag to those two scoundrels.  The purse remained safely locked in the supervisor's office.

In the end, the brother and wife were cracked open and the patient returned safely to her own home to live out the last few remaining days of her precious life.  I saw her once after that.  In the ER for a physical complaint secondary to her chemo treatment.  Considerably thinner, a little pallor to her skin and now, wearing a turban to cover her baldness, some of the life was gone from her eyes.  I was happy to see that she had a young, strong family member with her who was acting as protector, now.

There have been a few, count them on the fingers of one hand, incidences so satisfying that I've honestly felt that if I died at that exact moment, I would have absolutely no regrets.  One was the day the hospital employees rallied for this patient.  Weirdly enough, another was the night I got excepted to RN school.

No comments:

Post a Comment