January 29, 2010

Pre-op phone call

I really don't remember going through all this pre-op stuff in advance of scheduled surgery the last time I had a procedure. yesterday I had booked 30 minutes to take a phone call from a nurse. She wanted to review my entire medical history as known at Swedish, which goes back to 1988, before I moved to Seattle. (I imported medical records from my time in Washington DC.)

The nurse also reviewed my current meds, did a screening for domestic violence ("Are you safe where you are now?"), asked if I take any recreational drugs, and generally kept me talking for almost an hour.

The funny part was that even with all the information this nurse had available, much of it was wrong. Wrong date for a procedure. Wrong procedure, right date. Same procedure entered three separate times but listed differently each time. I realize some of this was due to the merger between Swedish and Providence hospitals, but really! Why wasn't the confusion cleared up the last time I had surgery, in 2005?

1 comment:

  1. It is a little scary, isn't it? Like maybe you'd best not go to sleep lest some mistake be made. Which makes the anaethesiologists job a bit harder, doesn't it?

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