My husband got a phone call in Cromwell asking for medical advice.
This is not a rare event in the life of a GP, but this time it was from one of our daughters in Dunedin. She had hit her head during some drunken shenanigans, and still had a headache some days later. Was that bad?
Simon asked some questions, but was then reassuring and we thought no more about it.
We arrived in Dunedin the following day. The daughter had struggled through her lectures that day because of her headache, so had gone to student health. They squeezed her in to see a very enthusiastic junior doctor who did a very thorough neurological examination and then spent 20 minutes on the phone with the neurology registrar. She decided our daughter had a concussion, and she should stand by for another call later in the day for advice on how to manage it.
We spent some hours with her that afternoon and she seemed pretty much as dizzy as usual so it rang no alarm bells for us. However, an hour after we dropped her at her flat, she rang us back rather upset. Apparently the young doctor had rung her back to say she might have a rare and serious complication from her head injury, and she needed to go to hospital immediately where they had organized her to be admitted and have an urgent brain scan. My husband was dismayed – WTAF was the sentiment although he doesn’t like swearing so it wasn’t vocalized in that manner. Lucky because we were on speaker phone to the whole flat at the time and his language may not have been suitable for young listeners.
We went to her flat to pick her up, and after brief discussions, and taking into account that the daughter was now officially freaked out, we proceeded to the hospital. Under level 2 COVID precautions, we had to wear masks in ED, and only one of us could be with her at a time. I can tell you the Dunedin Hospital ED waiting room is a shoe box. Luckily the medical registrar was waiting for us so we didn’t have to hang around with the hoi polloi for long – he whisked us away to the medical short stay unit. The city of Dunedin is in the process of building a new hospital in the old Cadbury chocolate factory building, and the old hospital is looking well past it’s use-by date. Having said that, my husband remembers the hospital being new when he was a medical student, which just goes to show…oh sorry, I forgot what I was going to say.
The registrar introduced us to the charge nurse of the ward. We were both still wearing masks, and the nurse said “Oh! Who is the mother, and who is the daughter?” which seemed a very odd thing to say. Was this a time for obsequious flattery? At least we were then allowed to take our masks off. The daughter got her own four bed unit, and was rapidly admitted with an efficient history and exam. She’d been out to a party with her flatmate several days before, and since they were now mature, more sensible students (19 years old), they’d left early to go home. Once in her room, around 11pm, she realised she had the hiccups. Her tried and true cure for this condition is doing a handstand and drinking a glass of water upside down. It wasn’t until she was falling forward that she remembered she was too drunk to do a handstand, but it was too late to pull out, so she fell onto her head instead. Her flat mates heard a thump but didn’t think anything of it. When she woke up the next day, she had a sore neck and a headache that was suspiciously hangover-like.
I’d told the registrar in the lift on the way up that I was afraid we were wasting everyone’s time, but he was having none of it. Definitely a severe concussion, at the very least, was his opinion. The poor man was phoned and also paged away several times during the time he was with us. I haven’t seen a pager in over a decade. At one point I asked the nurse if the daughter could have some paracetamol for her headache. This was the nurse who had previously been all smiles and charm, but now she looked at us with a flinty gaze and said “I’ll have to get the doctor to chart it if he’s happy to”. Which isn’t true, in fact – nurses are allowed to give paracetamol – but I knew better than to argue.
After the admission we just gave the poor girl a sandwich – she’d missed hospital dinner time which is always incredibly early, to suit the elderly clientele as well as the hospital kitchen staff, I expect – and left her to it. She was supposed to limit her screen time, but she did manage to let all her friends and sisters know where she was. Her sisters were full of sympathy. This from the oldest:
I think it was meant to be reassuring?
She had a miserable and anxious night of it, and didn’t get reviewed by the senior doctor until the post take ward round the next morning. We weren’t there for that, but apparently there were several groups of people who came to see her, for whom she had to repeat her story (always appreciated by her audience), and then be examined. Her eyes flickered a bit as she looked up at the ceiling, which was what had excited the junior doctors so much. The senior doctor was not impressed, however. Not even a concussion, in his opinion: it’s a migraine, he told her. Cancel the scan and send her home. We picked her up late morning and headed out for brunch.
Not sure what the moral of the story is but my best advice is to keep clear of hospitals if at all possible.