Glen Beck's hospital experience

Published

http://www.glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/198/3502/

What do you all think of this? There are several things about his tirade which rub me the wrong way but I really want to hear what you all have to say.

I think you should send that to him. I really do.

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Specializes in Utilization Management.

I agree. Excellent analysis and excellent post.

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Specializes in ICU, Med/Surg, Ortho.

I'm afraid it wouldn't do any good. Sigh.

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I'm afraid it wouldn't do any good. Sigh.

Couldn't hurt any. It's well written and contains accurate/helpful info. It could provide him with some insight in the future if he is ever in the hospital again. It's important for him to know why he waited and how his doctor could have aided him if he saw fit. Truth is everyone but Beck knows this wasn't an emergency. PLEASE send it. :up:

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Specializes in ICU, Med/Surg, Ortho.

Okay, I revised some and sent the following message to Mr Beck's email. on his site it says this:

This is the general contact for reaching Glenn Beck. Please note that Glenn gets hundreds of emails everyday and while he does read them he does not always have the opportunity to answer them all.

So he should read it. If I receive an answer I will post it.

The email I sent read:

Subject: Regarding your recent bad health care experience

Body:

Mr Beck:

Take responsibility for your care. Participate! Ask questions, ask for explanations.

Don't just assume nurses can read your mind and know what you need or what you need to know more about.

Ask what medicines you will be given, what they are given for, what side effects they may have, how often should you need them, how safe they are, etc. If you don't ask questions, the medical staff is going to assume you don't have any.

If you need help (i.e. a wheelchair) ask for it.

If your doctor recommends that you stay overnight - stay.

Your doctor had the responsibility to inform you of the amount of post operative pain you would be expected to have.

Assuming the doctor knew about your past history of drug abuse, he should have informed you that it is often very difficult to achieve adequate pain control in present or former abusers.

He also should have warned the anesthesiologist of the likelihood of your pain being very difficult to control because of this.

Nowadays nurses are extremely busy and we prioritize care. If your nurse wasn't spending much time with you, that means you were stable and not in danger.

If you were given a PCA, that means it was considered safe and you were expected to use it. If you were afraid of the side effects why didn't you tell the nurse and ask for further information?

Monitoring your breathing after surgery is common. When you were allowed to leave the recovery area it was because you were breathing okay and was no longer necessary. If you can talk, you are breathing alright. Panicking about it just makes the feeling of not being able to breathe worse. If the nurse says you are breathing fine - relax.

Your wait in the ER was because pain and bladder distension are not life-threating.

Life-threating conditions are seen first. And just because the waiting room patients were "sitting down" does not mean their condition was not worse than yours.

Nurses cannot take more patients than there is space available in the emergency room. Lots of patients are waiting for a test to be done, labs to be drawn, lab results to come back, a physician to come for a consult, etc. In those conditions the nurse can only wait as well. Nurses do have the right to socialize with their co-workers when they have nothing to do.

Your doctor knew that your condition would not be a priority in the emergency room and that you would wait in pain. Calling ahead does nothing - you will not get seen ahead of a sicker patient.

The doctor had the option of direct admitting you. You would have bypassed the emergency room and been taken directly to a hospital room. Any orders he wanted for pain control would have been started with no waiting.

The hospital system that you vilified did the best they could (excepting the rude nurse in the emergency room). The doctors you praised so highly are responsible for a large part of your bad experience.

So, don't assign blame without finding out who the guilty are.

In this case - I'm afraid it was largely your doctors and YOU!

Sincerely,

My name and title here

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Specializes in ICU, Med/Surg, Ortho.

Received an automated response a few minutes after sending the email:

...........................................................................................................

Thanks so much for the email. Due to the volume of mail this may be

the only response you see.

While I do not always see it in a timely fashion I do try to read all

of my mail. However, I average over 1000 letters a day and there is no

way I can respond to most letters.

I am glad you are listening and even though you may not see a response,

I want you to know that I am listening as well.

Thanks,

Glenn Beck

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Kudos StacieRN!! :cheers::w00t:

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StacieRN, you certainly put him in his place! With all that knowledge though, offering assistance if pt. is struggling or comforting anxiety perhaps could have squashed this incident all together! Caring profession?..... Anyway, what do I know, I'm an unemployed RN.:bugeyes:

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Specializes in critical care, rehab, med/surg.

:brnfrt: my goodness.........so sorry to hear about this. it, unfortunately is the tirade of many, "pt uneducated", nonsensical complaints. we are trained and experienced and we just assume our pts are already there, as well.........therefore they are speaking "out of school", as the saying would have it. i do believe that there are a lot of uncaring nurses in our profession, as i have witnessed it time and time again and, this outrages even me..........most especially as a pt. i am the type of person that gets upset anytime i am a consumer of anything and get less than a kind and personable person that assists me. in our profession we have to have kind and caring people to do the job. we are dealing with people's lives and the least we can do is to have a little compassion for them.

on that note i will close by saying thanks to all of the wonderfully caring nurses i have worked with and to the ones who have taken care of me!:yelclap:

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Well, I'm glad that I am not the only one who has a hard time deciphering this poorly written tirade.

Glenn Beck is one of those annoying talking heads that go around spouting off about how we are a nation of whiners and want to be coddled with, you know, far out "extravagances" such as universal health care.

What a drama queen. I love the fact that he thinks he should have a room all ready and waiting because his doctor "called ahead".

And cripes, who prescribes Fentanyl patches for post operative pain?

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It's apparent he was in for some type of minor surgery, but he also has a very low tolerance for pain. I am a Hospice RN and we don't give half of the meds he received to dying patients. Obviously his doctors gave him more than he needed for his pain control. I can't believe he and his wife were treated the way he reports.

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I'm looking back at this charmingly polite argument over a political talk show host ? Ahhh, those were the days.

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