May 10, 2013

• My Experience at the Sleep Disorders of Virginia Center

  I will start out by giving this place a 3 out of 10 on the Abu Ghraib prison torture scale.

  I had 2 studies done a this place in the course of 24 hours. The first was a complete sleep study at night. They hooked me up to 15 different electrodes on my face, a microphone on my neck, 2 EKG monitors on my chest, a belt that went around my chest and another that went around my stomach and then 2 electrodes on each leg, and 2 tubes up my nose.
  The night study went well, the techs were great, they were attentive, they answered my questions I had, when I needed assistance they were quick to respond. I wish I could say the same about the day time crew.
  They woke me up at 6am and said they would provide me with breakfast. For the day study they took off the belts and the electrodes on my legs but left most everyone on my head/face for the day study (I had to take a series of naps during the day for them to monitor and look at my brainwaves or whatever). I wasn’t allowed to have my cell phone and there wasn’t a clock in the room, but the night tech said at 7am that the day people would be there soon and they would give me breakfast.
  Total lie.

  The day tech guy didn’t come in til 9am he gave me a form to fill out what I wanted for breakfast. Since they didn’t have a nutrition guide and I still have to be careful about what I eat because I’m lacking a gallbladder I chose a toasted plain bagel with jelly.

  2 and a half hours later (almost noon) I got a halfwarm slimey bagel that had butter on it (I can’t eat butter) I told the tech this and he took my food and never came back. Now, it is ALL over my medical records that I have super bad problems with migraines, or I have had them in the past (they have been much MUCH better since I started to take a preventative since I’m allergic to EVERY rescue on the market. I get all the side effects, much of them are worse than the migraine itself. For example: Treximet makes my muscles seize so badly that it dislocates my fingers and toes. Yeah, it’s that bad. So IF I get a migraine I have to go straight to the ER to be hooked to an IV with highly powerful painkillers to knock the edge off. When I get a migraine that bad I usually can’t see out of my left eye and start vomiting uncontrollably).
  I told the guy I was starting to get a headache because I needed to eat. He was all like, “Well you can’t be hungry we just had breakfast.” (Sorry, any food near the 12pm hour is NOT breakfast, that is LUNCH and I didn’t actually get to eat ANYTHING because it took you 2 hours to give me food I can’t eat and then you failed to come back with something I could).

  Then he had me go down for another nap and said my “lunch” (really dinner because at this point it’s almost 4pm) would be ready. Now, the night crew told me that if at any time I need assistance to sit up in bed and call out because there is a microphone in the room and they have a thermal camera in there that they could see me on and if I was sitting up they would come in and help me (I was hooked up to a box that they had to disconnect for me to get out of bed to use the bathrooom and stuff). I tried to go to sleep hoping sleep would knock the edge off the pain but at this point I’m extremely nauseous and in so much pain I’m seeing bright white in a PITCH black room. Yeah. So I sit up in bed and started calling out for assistance for TEN MINUTES. I could have been having a seizure or something, it could have been much worse but I still feel like that is completely unacceptable treatment. By the time the guy came in to unhook me I was to the point where I needed to throw up even though I had nothing on my stomach and my sight in my left eye was incredibly limited. I had to leave the center immediately to get home and take a double dose of my preventative and some of the left over painkillers that I had from my gallbladder surgery (THANK GOD I still had almost a full bottle of those or else I would probably still be at the hospital on a painkiller drip). And it turns out whatever they used to put on the electrodes I’m allergic to because my face, my scalp, and every place that had stuff on it is burned/having an allergic reaction. It’s so annoying but at least it isn’t the blinding pain of a migraine.

  Honestly, I’m going to complain. And I’m about as non-confrontational a person as you can get but this was just too much.

  I definitely would not recommend this place to anyone I remotely like; so you know where you stand with me if I tell you to go there
  /rant

  • 12:51 pm
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