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MOLLY GLASSMAN: There are a lot of times when you're dealing with doctors and nurses
where you feel you're so inexperienced and they're the experts.
Why should I, you know, even question what they're doing?
I don't want to make them feel like I'm second-guessing them,
but you have to. My mom is even more reluctant than I am,
so it kind of forces me to play that role. She is still sharp mentally,
but she really has no interest in dealing with the medical side of things,
so she just kind of... she handed it all off to me.
One Sunday night, my mom got a terrible stomach flu at the assisted
living home, and my brother and I had to take her to the
emergency room. She had a terrible panic attack,
and they gave her an anti-anxiety drug that really set her off and started delirium.
She didn't know where she was, she didn't know who my brother was.
I told the doctor by phone, "Please, we don't want her to be receiving
this anti-anxiety drug." And he said, "Okay, no problem.
We're going to take her off of it." The doctor told me that he would put a stop
order on that drug and offer an alternative.
A couple of days later, I asked the nurse.
I said, "You know, I'd really like to check with you
on all the meds that my mom's getting." And the nurse checked the records, and said,
There's no stop order on this drug. It had never been done.
If I hadn't asked the nurse specifically to check the records in the computer
to make sure Mom's medicines were all where they should be,
I don't think it would have been remedied. I don't think they would have changed the
medication. That drove it home to me
that it's really good to ask questions. I think when you're dealing with the medical
establishment, you worry that if you rub somebody the wrong
way by asking too many questions
that it might affect the quality of care. There's definitely been times
when I've walked out of the office feeling like,
"I don't think I got all the information I needed to get about this new drug,"
or, "I should have followed up with a question about what are the long-term effects."
You have to get over that, though. You have to push through that and just say,
Look, I have to ask the questions. And I think my mom really appreciates
that somebody's being her advocate.