I got an e-mail from a friend of mine who blogs here;Hysterectomy Information - Home
Included in the e-mail were links to yet another medical care sufferer. Losing My Leg To A Medical Error. - Medical Office Group.: Ashworth College Community His story scares me on a personal level because my crna Aaron saw no problem with cranking down a pressure cuff on my upper arm to the point that for weeks/months afterward I experienced excruciating pain from it. The pressure cuff caused more pain than the botched surgery and was right up there with the pain I experienced from the kidney infection I got from the hospital. The pain was worse than the nerve pain from my ulna where my esteemed surgeon (or another) had left a LOCKING screw head loose and interfering with my ulnar nerve. (I emphasize LOCKING screw because I fail to understand how a LOCKING screw could rotate out of the bone and into my ulnar nerve. That really can't happen; I work with locking screws all the time and have NEVER had one back out, regardless of a vibration level far in excess of anything that happens inside the human body. My surgeon (or the janitor) HAD to have installed it that way.)
According to this doctor, I may eventually need to have my arm amputated. I have moderate numbness in my hand, that I assumed was from the doctor (or janitor) "tugging on the nerves" as my surgeon put it, during my ORIF distal radius surgery. Now I find out that the pressure cuff could actually have caused more damage than I ever imagined.
Aaron the crna, had use of a pressure cuff that could be inflated and deflated by a dual mechanism. I didn't know this until my second surgery to correct the major defects in the first. Apparently the pressure cuff contains two pressuring devices side by side. That way the cuff can be inflated in an adjacent area and deflated in the other in order to provide relief from a single pressure point. My second crna did this for me. When the pain became too great, he simply moved the pressure point. (In this second surgery I was NOT knocked out, nor sedated as per my instructions. Amazing that one crna understood me and Aaron couldn't!)
Aaron obviously didn't care to do this for me. After all, he had sedated me and knocked me out without permission and against my will, so OBVIOUSLY he didn't give a damn about what was "best" for me to start with. I'm sure he kept up his insulting chit-chat about me, while ignoring the potential for harm from him clamping down on my arm so severely and leaving it in that one spot for the duration of the surgery.
BTW the excuse I got for the trauma to my upper arm was that my blood pressure shot up (after Versed) and that the cuff had to be extra tight in order to combat that. My muscles actually drooped from the crushing of the pressure cuff. It was startling to me and even to my surgeon when I lifted my arm and displayed the droop.
The moral of this story is, don't ever trust medical people. Stay awake, without amnesia (that's for medical people who redefine the English language) if at all possible. That way if something hurts they will rectify it instead of leaving you suffering and causing yet more problems for you. After all, as this doctor says, the amputation cost $150,000 and the artificial limb cost another $50,000. We truck drivers have a saying for this kind of misbehavior and it's called, "job security." Don't allow them to use YOU AND YOUR BODY for their "job security"!
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