Glen Beck's hospital experience

Here is the e-mail I sent Mr. Beck:

Mr. Beck,

I read your rant about your experience after what I assume was surgery for hemorrhoids. You have some valid concerns. However, you praise your doctors and lambasted some nurses when it was your doctors who never should have allowed you to go home in the first place. Hemorrhoidectomies are notoriously painful and had you been admitted immediately to the hospital by your docs you could have bypassed the ER all together.

And for your info, "calling ahead" doesn't do anything in the ER. Do doctors really think we're going to hold off on the cardiac patient (in imminent danger of death, likely the guy who was called ahead of you) so we can hold a bed for their patient? ER's are triaged according to severity of illness.

Unfortunately it seems the triage nurse was unprofessional and I'm sorry about that, if in the ER again have your wife demand help. There is no excuse for the way you were treated though.

Also you seem misinformed about basic pharmacology...fentanyl is not only given to dying patients, it is a common opioid given to people in pain. It has a short half life, making it ideal to combine with other pain killers. No one would have let you stop breathing. The nice thing about all the painkillers you were on is that if you ever had been seriously in danger of respiratory failure all it would have taken is a shot of narcan to completely reverse the effects. A general rule of thumb is....if your patient is talking to you, they are not in respiratory distress. Patients who are truly in respiratory distress cannot talk....they can't spare the breath to do so. So, I can see why you telling a nurse you were having issues breathing may not have caused her to be alarmed. She should have talked with you more to discover the source of your fears though.

Also, if you were in serious danger of respiratory failure you wouldn't have remembered nurses asking you to breathe (that's common practice post-anesthesia); you wouldn't have remembered anything at all...you would have been sedated and intubated STAT. It bodes well for your respiratory status that you were never intubated.

Naomi R.N.

Probably went in to have his head removed from his butt. What a crybaby.