Not a great day...

Bit of a bummer day yesterday at work.  Firstly a girl in another department but who dealt quite a lot with my department was involved in a head on accident on the highway somewhere south of Cooma on the weekend.  She is “too critical” to move to Sydney and is still in the local hospital near where she had the accident.  She has very significant head injuries and from the sketchy reports I have heard is in a bad way.

Secondly, the father of one of my work mates died on Monday night.  What I can only think of as a horrific set of stuff ups, the guy went to hospital 2 weeks ago to have a hearing aid put in and never came out.  He had a benign tumour in amongst his ear and skull etc and it had grown to the size of a golf ball and was threatening to send him deaf.  The doctors debated and considered the hearing in that ear a lost cause and decided to remove the tumour before it became threatening and this meant losing the cochlear and all the “hearing bits” as well.  Sounds relatively routine.

My mates father is in his 70’s and goes ahead with the operation.  All seems a success at first, the tumour is removed and a device is attached to the skull behind the ear that results in an external socket to plug in a hearing aid.  All’s well until 24 hrs after the operation he wakes up with massive blood loss from the small socket.  Turns out that the membrane to the brain had been pierced and not correctly sewn together and he has lost blood and more importantly fluid from the brain onto his pillow.  They take him under and decide to remove the implant to let the wound from the tumour heal correctly.  At the time this happened, my work mate said the doctor told him that they should have done it that way in the first place because of his age and subsequent thin skin.  Basically it was sorry, my mistake… mea culpa.

He comes out of the operation with a large pressure bandage around his head and is feeling fine.  He recuperates in the hospital and there is talk of him going home.  They remove the pressure bandage and my mate said to me that he was worried as there seemed to be a large amount of bruising.

Then 24hrs later, he has lapsed into a coma and they discover that his brain had swollen dramatically due to something in the brain being blocked and they rush him in to insert a shunt.  This was on Thursday and I left for my long weekend.

Then I hear yesterday that he suffered problems over the weekend and I have heard that he suffered blood clots and despite the efforts of a fourth operation he passed away.

I am only writing this down as a bit of a record of how I saw the situation unfolding and I am truly shocked as my mate was happy that his dad was finally going to get his hearing restored and that this was to be a good thing.  Instead, it ends up in the worst possible situation and I am sure that there is some sort of behind the scenes issue with the doctors.

These two bad events yesterday make you think and make you realise that you cant take things for granted.