PP: Hospital Narrative

To understand what lead to my sister’s disease and treatment, one has to look at the structure of the hospital.  Biomedicine often tries to find a specific cause to the disease.  For my sister, she was looking for an event which would have caused a UTI which having gone untreated would lead to pyelonephritis. Although she was asymptomatic for a UTI, she recalled a shift she came in early at 11a.m. to cover for understaffing.  Her shift had been so busy that she did not realize until she left the hospital at 11p.m. that she had not gone to the bathroom all day. Likely, this was a the cause of her UTI and she diagnosed it as urinary infrequency, something she consistently suffers from. When she got treated, the ED had been understaffed as well which resulted in her long wait time.  Although the hospital has adequate supplies, the one resource that seemed to be lacking in both these cases were nurses.  Often times, nurses in the ED of her hospital have anywhere from 8-10 patients from critical to stable condition.  For any capable nurse, this patient load would be overwhelming.  There is a flaw to the structure of her hospital which lead to her illness as well as the inadequate care and treatment when she sought out medical care.  Not only did her illness affect her quality of work before she was diagnosed but her disease impaired her from working for a week. My sister’s illness narrative revealed a flaw in the structure of her hospital which perpetuated harm, not only to her but her patients as well as her fellow nurses.