Advocating

To Advocate means to speak up for yourself or someone else. It is when you say what you need. I would like to start by telling you guys 3 stories. The first story, I do not think I advocated for myself enough. The second and third stories, I fully advocated for Aryi. 

Story 1: When I had my C-section, it got infected. I told the doctors that something was wrong. I was in so much pain. I told them there is no way I was supposed to be in this much pain. They gave me IV Vancomycin and discharged me the same day even though I was telling them something was still wrong and I was still in pain. Noone listened, noone believed me, so I went home. Not 24 hours later, my incision started to leak smelly pus. The infection had finally made its way out. I went back to the ER. Since I was leaking pus they were able to sample it and test for infection. They had given me the wrong medicine and sent me home for the infection to grow. I guess I should have said more. I don’t know, refused to sign discharge papers. I should have shouted until someone heard me, until someone would listen. 

Story 2: When Aryi was in the NICU there was a nurse that just let Aryi’s oxygen monitor go off for like 30 minutes at a time. She just let him continue to have desaturations. I told her multiple times his oxygen needed to be bumped up. After a month of sitting in the NICU 12-16 hours a day watching Aryi’s oxygen monitor go up and down, I fully understood when he was just wiggling, when he was in a bad position, and when they really needed to turn his oxygen up or down. She wouldn’t listen. I found another nurse to turn his oxygen up. I went to the department leader and made sure she would never be taking care of Aryi again. 

Story 3: When Aryi got Human Metapneumovirus and had to go to the hospital for a few days, the residents taking care of him couldn’t hear him wheezing even though you could fully hear it without a stethoscope. (It was so bad that 2 days after we left the hospital at our followup with Aryi’s pediatrician, she could hear it. But they couldn’t hear it days earlier in the hospital when it was way worse. I don’t know how they graduated.) I told them we needed Aryi’s nebulizer treatments to help his wheezing. I asked to speak to another doctor. They let us have one, even though our doctor was having us do it 3 times a day. I ended up just bringing ours from home. 

Medical error is a huge problem. I don’t understand how people that go into the hospital and know absolutely nothing about the medical system make it out alive. There are more women in the health field, and yet women are more likely to have a negative health outcome just because no one will listen to them. 

In the second and third stories I advocated for Aryi, I really made a fuss. I made sure someone would listen to me. Even when you do this, half the time you still do not get taken care of. And when at the end of the day no one listened to me about Aryi’s nebulizer treatments, I made it happen myself. 

However, if you don’t advocate or advocate hard enough for yourself as in my first story, no one will listen to you or take you seriously. If I did not know enough to go back to the ER I could have died and there would be no consequences for the doctors that discharged me even though I was telling them something was wrong. 

Advocate for yourself. You know your body better than anyone else. Advocate for your baby. You know your baby better than anyone else. Make someone listen to you.