On Thanksgiving a couple of years ago I wound up quarantined in a hospital room the size of a walk-in-closet.
The trouble started early on turkey day when I was cleaning the cranberries with my son Cary. I had some difficulty breathing and a tightness in my chest. After a while, at his insistence, we drove to a hospital ER.
There was an especially long wait because of short staffing, but I finally spoke to a nurse and my breathing problem got her attention. Heart tests first, then x-rays. Then more waiting for results.
A patch on my lung looked like an infection, so I was grilled about my recent travels, which included several third-world countries. My son joked about my risk-taking ways, and offhandedly mentioned the many possible problems of a globe-trotting mom, including tuberculosis.
Repeat after me: Do not say TB in an ER. (Especially on TG.)
Within a couple of minutes the nurse placed us into a sealed room. We waited on separate examining tables, confused, shocked and unsure of what was to come.
Cary and I both took patch tests, sputum tests and blood tests. The doctors and nurses who attended us suited themselves in protective gear like extras in The Andromeda Strain. I could hear outside the sealed room that some of them didn’t want to come in.
A neurologist, clearly unhappy about being yanked from a turkey-laden table, eventually gave me a spinal tap, and I now had to wait for the results of that. And I would have to take a CT/biopsy scan.
So while my son got to leave the sealed room, I was told I needed to be put upstairs, in quarantine.
The hospital room seemed like a cage. Normally patients with similar possible diagnoses —a low level of TB— would be allowed to leave the room and walk in the halls. But doctors wanted me to stay confined for the immediate future until they could perform more tests, and because they were understaffed and couldn’t monitor me properly. And tests were slowed because of the Thanksgiving weekend.
As the days passed, both my sons alternated coming up from NYC, suited up in protective gear with shower caps, gloves and masks. It was a warm and fuzzy family holiday scene. About all I could concentrate on was Boggle. The room didn’t have wireless, and I didn’t want to watch the family-oriented shows of Thanksgiving weekend with my hazmat-suited sons.
I paced around my bed back and forth like a caged lioness, for exercise and for mental relief. And what if I did have TB? I imagined spending weeks in that drab space with a high-tech vent and an ultraviolet light that killed the bacteria sucked out of the room. My only view of the outdoors was a wall.
The tests took forever. I felt like a prisoner jailed for some made up charge. I learned that some statutes had vague criteria for release ("no longer a danger to the public health") and some, specific (evidence in sputum tests that the person is no longer actively contagious). Ten states had no statutory limits on the time a patient could be held without discharge or recommitment. I was afraid to ask what New York’s policies were.
Even more: Several states do not require a court order or a hearing to commit someone to a facility. The hearing may be held with or without the patient. Only thirteen states explicitly grant the right to be represented by counsel in any part of the proceedings.
I didn’t sleep or eat much. I became sure that this was all just a trick to lock me up.
Slowly my tests kept coming back negative, but the doctors still wanted to see a CT scan biopsy, and that meant I had to wait for the right doctor to do it, and he wasn’t around. On the fourth day of confinement I was finally brought out of my room and rolled into the CT cylinder.
And then I rolled out a minute later. The patch seemed smaller! I didn’t need a biopsy. I didn’t have TB, and I could leave as soon as I got dressed and filled out papers and had a doctor ok everything. A few more hours, and then, finally, a chance to give thanks.
I flew out of that hospital faster than a pardoned turkey, and gobbled that long-overdue holiday dinner at home. It had been a lousy weekend.
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Comments
I hope you didn't have to pay for all this.
At least you got a really compelling story out of it, if that's any consolation ;)
BUT. Having worked in a hospital, I learned a lot about TB and what I learned surprised me, and isn't known by most "civilians".
e.g., That it's increasingly prevalent, including in the US. That many forms are drug-resistant now and hard to treat. That it's highly fatal if untreated, and that people often either don't seek treatment for it or stop treatment (the drugs are apparently quite nasty).
And so yes, there have been cases of people with TB out there infecting many people. Hospital workers also get infected (we all had to be tested every year for it, even those of us who didn't have patient contact). So there are reasons hospitals go to Def-Con 4 when suspecting TB.
People think TB is either an outdated or obscure disease or that you take a few antibiotics and it's cured. Not so. It's one of the most fatal diseases on the planet these days. And unlike, say, HIV, it doesn't take much contact, or even any contact to catch it. Breathing the same air is enough, and you don't even have to be in the same room (it stays alive in the air for quite some time) -- which is why hospitals have to put even suspected TB patients in negative airflow rooms, to prevent them contaminating other patients and staff. It's that contagious.
So while it all sounds like ridiculous overkill, what they did was completely within protocol to prevent others from contracting a very very dangerous disease until they could be sure that's not what you had.
High Lonesome, it is a sad thing that such a terrible disease is still prevalent. I hope our health care system improves enough under Obama to eradicate this and other shameful inadequacies in preventive care and public health for the underserved communities (despite their overkill with me).
Silkstone, we learned much from your comment. Thank you for adding info to enlighten us on this real problem which we don't hear about much.
I'll ask the doc-in-the-family when he appears.
Sorry you had to go through that, what a colossal bummer, especially during the holiday season!
rated because you earned it.
HTG
G
(lazy huh?)
G, Thks. HTG2U2.
Yes, Dick. You got it exactly. It felt like something out of a surreal novel or a Hitchcock movie. Whew is right.
He said you didn't meet his criteria for isolation, barring something he didn't know about (most specifically a productive cough), and your son's inadvertent invocation of the magic word shouldn't have entered into the decision making. He also said patients must be informed of why they're being placed in isolation, how long they're expected to be kept isolated (e.g. until what event happens), and, ethically if not legally, that they can't be held against their will without a court order, etc.