HypoBactro

Breaking up the original wall of text /u/users9 posted because it deserves to be read. Please upvote his comment, not mine.

> What was the original comment? it has been deleted. a fecal transplant saved my mom's life.

> Yes, it was controversial. the procedure was never heard of before by her young Harvard educated GI doctor 2 years ago. I had done some research the previous time my mom was infected with c. diff the prior year and that's where I learned of the fecal transplant, but eventually that time the antibiotics cleared it up after a long series of trying harder and harder antibiotics.

> This second time she was infected antibiotics would not clear it up after rounds of insane doses of the hardest antibiotics available via IV. She laid in the hospital malnourished, weak, and probably days from death. When we started looking for doctors to do the transplant we only found a handful that would do it, and we were lucky to only be a few hours away from Dr. Brandt in NYC. He could do it at 4pm on Thursday or we'd have to wait until the next week for another appointment. I have no doubt that my mom would not have lived that long.

> The day we were supposed to be discharged from the current hospital in upstate NY to go to nyc the discharge process started at 10am. Throughout the day we kept being told the discharge has not happened yet. As the day dragged on we were panicking. Finally at about 1 o'clock, while my mom was still hooked up to her IV I wheeled her out into the hallway in a recliner on wheels and said we're leaving, discharge or not. It was a scene.

> Finally the hospital patient advocate got involved and helped us figure out why my mom hadn't been discharged. It turned out the doctor on call wouldn't discharge us because my mom was in such bad shape that he didn't want to be responsible if something happened to her and he had been the one who signed the discharge papers. I said I don't give a fuck if they discharge us or not, we're leaving and I was about to remove her IV myself.

> Suddenly the doctor comes running down the hall and starts explaining all that to us and would not give me a straight answer on whether or not he would discharge us. I held my ground that we we're leaving either way and finally he had my mom sign a paper that she was leaving against doctor's orders.

> By then we were late for Dr. Brandt and feared he wouldn't do the procedure that day, all because of this fucking miraculously incompetent doctor and the hospital overall, but that amazing human being Dr. Brandt agreed to stay late if we could get there real fast.

> So we got her down there and after inspecting her with an endoscope he said it was the worst and most damaging case of c diff he had ever seen, and was going to use her case as a reference in his research.

> 2 days later and my mom was back from death's door and almost fully recovered except for the swelling in her legs because the fucking incompetent staff at the original hospital refused to give her any protein. They kept saying it would come in her meals but then kept ordering her soup and other bullshit with no protein. After she could no longer walk they finally hooked her up to a protein IV after over a week in the hospital with no protein intake and literally 24x7 diarrhea.

> We found out that the reason the doctor wouldn't discharge her was because the insurance company wouldn't pay for an ambulance to the hospital where the fecal transplant was to occur, and thus the doctor couldn't transfer responsibility to another party. Also, the transplant wasn't covered under my mom's insurance so Dr. Brandt billed just for the endoscopy. I recently read that hospitalists make over $200k a year which saddens and enrages me because they are absolutely some of the most dangerous and lowest scumbags on the planet. I've never met a single one that wasn't a piece of shit.

> Also, when we weren't sure if we could get an appointment with Dr Brandt or any other doctor to do the transplant I went to Walmart and bought a saline enema, a blender, and the other items necessary to try to do it ourselves, as others on the internet had written about. My sister had already been cleared as a donor and was ready to make the donation. My mom's IBS was relieved after the procedure as well.

> I just read that 300 people per day die from c. diff, which is a huge tragedy that I believe very strongly is 300 more people than need to die from this. Hopefully we can pull our collective heads out of our asses and figure out why alternative treatments with such obvious positive results, already in widespread use in other countries, take so long to become adopted in the US. I suspect it has to do with our attitude that our American way is always the best, our acceptance of shit doctors who are not motivated by results but covering their asses, and our reliance on the big medical companies to solve our problems rather than seeking alternate solutions.

> There were also two instances where the nurse gave my mom the wrong dose of the very powerful antibiotic and when I said that to them they blamed other people or the pharmacy for providing the wrong dose. Well if i could figure that out they should have been able to. Hospitals are scary places full of incompetent people that are probably only in the field for the guaranteed (and insane) paycheck. I could go on and on about all the bullshit in this story but it's late.

> I could talk about how nurses would take hours to come when called as my mom laid in bed pooping on herself because she couldn't get up on her own, or would be sitting on the toilet in pain for hours waiting for a nurse to come help her off of it, but that didn't happen because I refused to leave my mom's side as we saw how incompetent and understaffed they were during the day I refused to leave at night.

> After the procedure in NYC she was admitted to that hospital and we were told no visitors overnight so we again demanded she be discharged because we were not leaving her. After a few meetings with the head nurse they finally allowed one person to stay overnight but it was a fight each night. And each night it was hours long waits for a nurse to respond to calls.