When Kathy Day, a retired nurse in Bangor, Maine, received a diagnosis of uterine cancer, she decided to focus not only on how her condition would be treated but also on the way she wanted to be treated by the doctors and nurses in the hospital. As a nurse, Day understood that busy hospital staffers aren’t always as attentive as they should be.
She also had felt frustrated and condescended to in the fall of 2008, when her 83-year-old father was hospitalized elsewhere in Maine for an ankle fracture. He was discharged, then readmitted a few days later with what Day says was a MRSA (methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus) infection, which he acquired during his first stay—and which ultimately killed him.
“MRSA wasn’t diagnosed right away, but my family and I knew something was seriously wrong,” she says. But when Day asked questions, the hospital staff behaved as though she was overreacting. “One nurse said, ‘Your dad is just tired. He’s been through a lot,’ ” she recalled. “Even after MRSA was discovered, one of the doctors shrugged and said, ‘Well, these things happen. There isn’t much we can do about it.’ And though he was coherent throughout his illness, the doctors rarely spoke to him directly about his treatment; they came to my mother and me.”
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