Sorry I know it’s long, but nowhere near as long as those two days were.
I recently had surgery in my local country hospital. Some background is needed here. It’s a pretty small hospital that caters mainly to the elderly who are sick enough to require 24hr nursing for an illness, or to low risk birthing situactions. There are visiting surgeons who’ll come in and perform low risk surgeries, but even then it’s mostly day surgery procedures with the occasional hip/knee replacements or gynaecological surgeries, skin cancer excisions etc. The anesthecists are all local doctors with anaesthesia training. Even the records are still paper files with no computers outside of the private practice ER. One essential “low risk” barrier is a BMI <40. Unlike most public hospitals in Australia the ER is run by a private medical practice and they charge people to use it. There is no surgeon on call, and nights and weekends the only doctor on the premises appeared to be whichever local GP happened to be on the ER roster. You can get an xray after hours but everything else has to wait. If a patient requires more than this they are choppered out to a city hospital. The hurdle for this kind of transfer is pretty high as you’d imagine.
After recovering sufficiently I was moved to a share room. I couldn’t initially see the size of my roommate but once she got out of bed it was clear she was a young (25-low 30s) woman. Turned out she was a local nurse that had recently transferred from another hospital. Her BMI was at least 50. Supposedly suffering extreme stomach pain that she said had come and gone over the past 10 years or so, and was absolutely a pain medication seeker…she’d start screaming whenever she’d hear a nurse outside of the room then press her call bell demanding more narcotics. Claimed she was constipated, vomiting etc (in 2 days I didn’t see her vomit once but sure heard her trying to force it). Most of her colleagues took what she said at face value, but one skinny wiley older nurse wasn’t having a bar of her nonsense. One of the first things the patient said to me was that I needed to report this nurse for “fatphobia”. That was the first time I’ve heard that term used IRL outside of social media. Turned out this skinny old nurse was responsible for getting the fatty from the ER to the ward. The patient insisted on needing a wheelchair because she was in agonising pain (although she was well above the weight limit for the one available). The “fatphobia” was being told she could walk, and that she was too heavy for the available wheelchair and for this nurse to push alone. Over the 48 hours I was there this woman made many trips daily to the drinks, snacks vending machine in another area of the hospital. She could manage that walk multiple times daily but would hold her stomach and moan and groan the entire time, no doubt to attract attention. Whenever a nurse wasn’t in the room, she was constantly eating, despite allegedly being in extreme pain from constipation. At meal times she not only ate everything on her meal tray but also most of my meals. The doctor tried to discharge her the next morning but this woman refused to leave because she was “in too much pain”. Doctors had already looked at a recent CT and had done an ultrasound (which had to be done vaginally due to all her fat) just to make sure there was no ovarian torsion or bowel blockage. She was insisting on a transfer to a big city hospital but was denied many times, being told her condition was not an emergency and that no hospital would accept her as a transfer patient. I would have left that day except there were a couple of hurdles I needed to get past before I could be discharged, and by the time I was cleared it was too late to get medications from a local pharmacy (the hospital had no dispensing pharmacy either) so had to wait until the next morning.
I don’t think she realised that I had a special diet, because the second night at around midnight, she asked one of her colleagues to go to the kitchen and get her a sandwich, then asked me to get one as well. So the nurse bowed to her demand and came back with both sandwiches. Due to my “special diet” they were different and of course fatty wanted mine, but sadly for her it was made with wholemeal bread. She did nothing but complain that her basic white bread boiled egg sandwich didn’t have enough mayo, while mine was a really fresh egg and salad (with ample mayo). Of course that was also “fatphobia” at play. I really did enjoy that sandwich because the cow had eaten most of my meals including all desserts, fruit juices etc, so I ate the lot. Once again after eating her lollies and crisps from the vending machine for most of the night between nurse calls for extra morphine shots, it was a second night of no sleep and listening to her plan which hospital to hit up next if they discharged her the following morning. She even admitted that she had driven herself to the ER (allegedly while in so much pain she was vomiting and cramping so much that she was doubled over in pain), and intended to drive herself from this hospital to a city one over an hour away. She was horrified when I suggested ones that don’t charge ER fees, because she had no idea that this particular hospital charges private fees for ER and she would be going home to a bill.
While I would love to know what happened when the doctor saw her the following morning, I couldn’t get out of the place fast enough, so discharged as soon as a local pharmacy opened, but not before her insisting I report certain staff for their fatphobia. I do know that by that morning though the nursing staff were also onto her and had had enough. Turns out one of them decided to station themselves behind the partially closed door to our room and listen to hear her chat away like nothing was wrong, then moan and groan in agony if she heard a nurse in the corridor. I wouldn’t want to be her when she eventually has to return to work in that hospital because I doubt her colleagues will be as sweet and obliging to her as they were while she was inpatient.
