Health Matters; My worst hospital experience.

Hospitals? Hmmmm. I don’t like hospitals even though their services are highly needed and very helpful which in other words cannot be underestimated. I still don’t like going to hospitals. My hospital experiences has not been funny.

I’ve had a fair share of hospital experiences ranging from the bad to the ugly and they are nothing good to write home about.

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What made it your worst hospital visit?

The trauma I passed through was unbearable and to add salt to injury was the fact that I was only a teenager. An innocent 16 year old child.

Dad had fallen sick when I just finished my senior Waec exams. I was gracefully awaiting my Jamb results to gain admission into the university. Little did I know that life had otherwise to say.

He was diagnosed with low blood pressure and brain tumor. He had been operated on and just when we thought he was recovering, he had a relapse. He was rushed to the hospital and I and mum was to look after him.

Dad was conscious but didn’t know what was happening around him. He couldn’t eat on his own neither could he do anything on his own. The image of the whole scenario still feels like yesterday.

The hospital were we were admitted couldn’t handle the case and we were referred to another hospital in another state. As if that’s not enough, my younger sister too was sick and was at the point of death.

Our hands were full. We got to the new hospital and after all the pain, stress and trauma, dad died after few days. My life came to a stand still. I couldn’t stand the pain in my mums voice when she was literally begging my younger sister not to die too. Thank God she didn’t. We were four persons that entered the hospital and three left.

How were you treated by the hospital staff?

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I don’t know the issues with most hospital staff but they didn’t treat me well. My dad died in the night and I had already gone to bed. When I got to find out my dad had died the next morning when I woke up, I asked the nurse in charge of my dad and she casually told me he had died.

I insisted that I wanted to see my dad and I wanted to throw a tantrum as a child that just lost her dad but the casual and insensitive way with which the nurse told me that if I want to see him, I should go to the mortuary and not disturb her made the tears to dry up.

I was wondering how someone can be that insensitive even to a child. I was just too young for her meanness.

As if that’s not enough. That same day that I lost my dad, I took my sister to the ultrasound for a stomach scan. After the scan, I was looking for what to use and clean the scan serum on her tummy. I begged the man that did the scan to please give me some tissue from the tissue roll he had but the man bluntly refused.

It’s just tissue paper for Christ sake. Did u know that I had to use my sisters cloth that was on her body to clean her up while the tissue was just sitting on his table and he didn’t even care.

Tears filled my eyes and I just said to myself what a way to treat little girls that just lost their dad. My sister was just six and I sixteen. I left that office with tears. I was wondering why the staff are so mean.

Any specific challenges you faced?

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I faced a lot of challenges in that hospital because we stayed there for over a month. One of the major challenges was the meanness and rude way the staff talks to people. They talk like they lack human sympathy.

Another challenge I had was navigating my way through the hospital. It was a big hospital and you would have to walk from one end to the other to get things done. The distance from one department to the other were much and it was a very stressful and tiring experience. My feet hurt so badly.

I had the challenge of grappling with so much emotional trauma from the kind of sickness and issues people had. You would be seeing dead bodies being carried out literally almost everyday and it was too much for me to handle at that age.

How did you feel during and after the experience?

During my stay in the hospital, despair and hopelessness was the order of the day. I couldn’t just wait to leave that environment.

Hmmmmm. It’s been almost twenty years but the memories feels like yesterday. I’ve been able to recover from the pain of losing my dad but somehow the experience of how those hospital staff treated us has just been there.

It’s like I could still literally see the looks on their faces when they were doing their mischief. Till tomorrow, I still wonder why some hospital staff are mean and insensitive especially the nurses.

I ask @ruthjoe, @ninapenda and @jovita30 to contribute to this contest.