18 .Hospital negligence

Again at the Tres Vías dispensary, Dr. Máxima was called urgently to see a serious patient.

It was about a famous person in town who had had a stroke. After taking her blood pressure and stabilizing the patient by reducing her pressure, using medications and physical means, she recommended to the family members their immediate transfer to the IESS hospital in Esmeraldas.

At the time when he was about to embark with the patient to accompany them, he remembered the words of his father who told him that an emergency patient must always be accompanied to the hospital, because if he goes in a private vehicle or in a ambulance, generally those who carry it do not know what to do if it gets complicated on the road. But the most serious thing is that if he arrives at the hospital, usually who receives him is a student who is doing internships in emergencies, and what he is going to do is send the patient back home. They are generally boys who, because they wear the apron and have made some sutures, believe themselves to be doctors with the freshest and most up-to-date knowledge than their teachers.

Finally, he could not accompany the patient who already had a hemiplegia, to the hospital, because he had to attend to another who had had an accident with a mache and his knee artery was bleeding dramatically, voting blood from meters away, there was immediate stay stop bleeding.

-Please, this is my cell phone number, when you get to the hospital, call me if you have a problem- she told the old woman and her children who found a truck to transfer him on the back lying down.

While on the second floor, after applying a temporary tourniquet to her thigh, she proceeded to collapse the artery because it was very difficult, with the few resources available to the office, to do anything else.

When the old man arrived at the IESS Hospital in Esmeraldas, they immediately entered the emergency room.

The emergency medicine doctor was facing other problems and one of the new students took care of them.

The nurse took her pressure, she realized that she was stabilized.

The young practitioner examined the pupils that were uneven and the patient's reflexes were absent on the right side. It was evident that the paralysis of the half of the body had occurred and that it was irreversible.

-Here there is nothing to do- he told the relatives

"Are you sure doctor?" Asked the wife, still incredulous.

- Yes ma'am. It is a cerebral infarction that has paralyzed his right side.

"Come on mom," said one of her children. - Let's go back in the same truck.

They put the patient back in the back of the truck and made the trip back to Tres Vías, which took an hour. But on the way the patient suffered another heart attack.

Two days later, the doctor who visited that dispensary spending a day went to see the relatives and she came across the news that the patient had been returned.

"What do you mean they didn't admit him?" She asked annoyed.

- Yes doctor, they did not send back, because they had nothing to do in the case they told us.

-When examining the old man again, he no longer had hemiplegia but quadriplegia.

During the following days, once a week he went to check it, sores had formed on his body.

-They have to buy an anti bedsore mattress and we will have to use stronger antibiotics- that bad smell is produced by a deadly bacteria, it is called pseudomonas aureginous and it is very difficult to cure it.

In the following months, the wife was the only one accompanying the patient and she did not have the strength to move him every day.

-Again you have to take him to the hospital to be treated for bedsores and appropriate medicines, the antibiotics we give him do nothing in these cases and the ones he should receive are more expensive.

History repeated itself again. The patient arrived at the IESS hospital, this time if he was treated by the emergency physician, but the hospital had no beds. Relatives brought the medication. It was a great relief for the whole family when months later the patient died.

Máxima then recalled what her father experienced when she had a burn patient when he worked in San Juan de Lachas. In a young woman who suffered an accident on the bus in which she was traveling, she injured her spine and after months of paralysis, she developed bedsores. That foul smell was not resisted by the nurses, nor by the hospital assistants, and he took the case personally. He repeatedly sent her to the Ibarra hospital and they returned her saying that they could no longer do anything, she finally died leaving a little girl. Those medicines of matico and guarango that he used with Don Sebas did not help much, they were months of torture.

Her father told her that emergency patients had to be accompanied to the hospital and made sure that they should be admitted and even intervene in the immediate diagnosis and treatment.