Parker's friend "Quinn" from the Sidhbh post comments section made her own top surgery post. It's got a guest appearance by Shibby herself, which tells us she's watching her patients (or at least watching for her name in tagged posts):
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Holy fuck:
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Felt these two needed to be pulled out and put together.
Patient writes that they
only needed to go to the ER for a staph infection requiring IV antibiotics and an emergency abscess drain
because they didn’t contact Dr Sidhbh Gallagher for oral antibiotics soon enough. It is one thing to let a patient know that they should bring up concerns as soon as possible, but another to make your patient feel like they should specify that their not calling is why they needed IV antibiotics and emergency care (even if, in part, it is- sometimes these things happen and you just choose not to be an arse about it especially when you can see how vulnerable someone is.)
Reasons this concerns me: her services are readily advertised to people with phone anxiety, by insisting you can communicate via email and text. So of course, these are also the types of people who do not follow up as readily without prompting. Prompting Dr Sedehbuh cannot keep up with due to such a mammoth patient load. Even still, this patient (who’s weight appears to be in the high risk category) raised the concern, just four weeks out, of feeling unwell with a site of pressure/uncomfortable granulation.
So, was this over text? Email? Did Dr Teetus Deletus even so much as phone/video call with this patient before deciding they would need oral antibiotics and that would be fine? Were the photos exchanged confirmed to be up to date? Were previous photos asked after for comparison/to see how quickly this issue was getting worse? Did we consider this was a wound in a moist area (armpit) of an overweight patient just four weeks out of surgery? Did we take into account the patient hadn’t said they felt crappy during the earlier weeks (more pain), but do say this now (evidence of a less localised infection)? Or, more likely, did we throw antibiotics over to their local pharmacy and then when told they’d needed to seek ER treatment make sure they knew it was their fault for not making a bigger deal about it originally?
The time frame is just days, and this abscess once drained was already large enough to require ongoing specialist wound management. Sounds like they were put on an IV general antibiotic when admitted to the ER, then once cultures confirmed staph, switched to a more appropriate IV antibiotic. They’d have been kept in.
ETA: patient also says the reason they’re wearing the bandages is because of ongoing wound care. The bandaged sites are under the armpit (abscess site) and in the middle of the scar/chest. If this second bandage is due to the same infection, this may indicate there was tunnelling involved. This wasn’t just a nuisance/niggling infection.
So, I assume the patient did send images evidentiary of infection (hence Dr Sidhbh Gallagher prescribing oral antibiotics), but the formation of an abscess at a surgery site in an area prone to infection (and an area that is harder to keep clean and dry, especially if overweight), with a general sense of feeling unwell, didn‘t concern her enough to prompt the patient to actually attend a minor injuries unit or wound clinic? Or even get an emergency appointment with your primary care provider? Anything involving seeing someone who can properly examine them in person (not just over the phone)?
Her reasoning for contacting the surgeon first is because they best understand your surgery and case, yes, but if that surgeon is out of state or in another country- delaying care- any doctor or nurse can see, smell, feel that a surgical wound is not ok, regardless of if they’ve seen a patient with top surgery before. It is still a surgical site. They don’t need to know the ins and outs of top surgery to say “you need more than oral antibiotics for that.”
