Thanks to Faithful Blog Reader, Temporary Fix to Noisy Neighbor Nightmare….

A faithful reader sent me a link to a sound file.  This is a “sample” that he found on the Internet of low frequency noise.  I downloaded it into my own computer and have looped into a player.  I plugged a set of earphones into my computer to listen to the file.

When I have a minute, I will edit the sound file to remove the rather brief empty space at the end, so I will have continuous low frequency noise.  I think the seller would most likely prefer that the sound file is purchased at full length, however.

What I have found is that this sound file, if played into headphones, works fairly well at drowning out that damn TV next door. It’s a temporary fix, but I feel a great deal of relief just to have a break instead of nonstop extremely loud TV.

I mean, what else am I supposed to do? Vanna White will never, ever retire, after all.  Those neighbors in this hallway will be watching  Wheel of Fortune for the next 50 years!

Many thanks to the faithful blog follower and dear friend who sent the link.  I can’ t have headphones in all day long, but this will do for now.

There were other times today that I listened to music in headphones as alternative to that Wheel of Fortune.  But the low frequency noise is much preferable.  Rock music tends to be noisy.  Like TV.  I long for that lady to just turn the damn thing off.  Maybe I can get her interested in hitch-hiking, eh?

Patient Abuse at Mount Auburn Hospital, Cambridge, MA, the truth comes out……

It’s hard to believe all this time has passed (it’s now around the beginning of May 2014) and the abuse happened last August 2013. I still suffer the effects of trauma from it. I don’t cry every day anymore, thank goodness, but my fearfulness seriously affects how I live my life.

About a week ago, I received in the mail (finally!) my records from Mount Auburn Hospital. Legally, I cannot share them with you, but I can discuss them using my own words plenty! This place, Mount Auburn, was where this abuse happened last summer. They did send the report promptly, however, much was left out. You could tell that before the records were even filed, they removed pages from my file. The “charts” are notebooks, that is, they are three-ring binders. So the pages can easily be taken out of these binders and tossed out. That’s what happened, folks. My record was taken out of this binder after I left the hospital and then sent to their records department with pages removed.

So certain practitioners made notes in my file stating certain things that of course would have made the hospital look very, very bad, but these notes, I suspect, badly incriminated the hospital, so the hospital clearly decided that to keep their name clear, they removed these notes well before anyone could access them. It’s so easy to do!

For instance, I recall speaking to the nutritionists and these folks were actually interested in FOOD. However, I also told a few that I was being abused and told them part of what was going on. I asked them if I was consuming enough calories and they said I certainly was consuming plenty of calories on my own. I told the nutritionists, therefore, that there was no further reason to drug me with Zyprexa to increase my appetite in an unnatural fashion. I told these nutritionists that adding Zyprexa made no logical sense, especially since my body was asking for exactly what it needed all by itself without drugs. It is notable that there are no notes from the nutritionists included in this record that Mount Auburn sent me. Of course, the nutrition notes were removed! This isn’t a complete record, even though that’s what I paid for! The current record is incomplete and all record of abuse has been obliterated.

Not only that, the name mixup they did is not recorded. If what they sent was truly a “complete record,” then clearly something is missing here. They mixed me up with Julia Green and I am Julie Greene. They did not state that a search of my apartment was ordered, nor do my records state who ordered the search.

It’s most likely that the attending psychiatrist ordered the illegal search of my apartment, and that it was done by police. The hospital could have legally left out my mental health records and omitted them from what they sent me. Actually, anything an all-holy psychiatrist writes is legal to omit from what they send you when you request your records. All mental health records can be withheld.

As for the “sitters,” I was lied to while in the hospital as to who made the decision regarding these sitters. For those of you who do not know what “sitters” are, these are 1:1 people hired by an outside agency to watch a patient. The decision was made by a “hospitalist.” I don’t happen to recall meeting this guy. Apparently, he’s the one that “spoke” with Dr. P, however, I don’t think they truly spoke. I’m sure this was one single voicemail left by Dr. P for this hospitalist and that was it. The hospitalist (this term I had not ever heard of, apparently they do the work that social workers used to do but they are doctors) never spoke with me directly or asked me ANYTHING directly. He assumed I was stupid, unreliable, nuts, etc. No, I needed food, but other than that, as you can see, I am extremely intelligent and witty and he might have enjoyed cracking a few jokes with me!

They had an awful lot of facts incorrect. Totally!

For one thing, they stated that I was being seen once a week by a visiting psychiatric nurse. Not true! My CBFS worker was a person just out of undergrad, and many CBFS workers don’t really have a college degree. I’m sure they don’t. My worker admitted to me more than once that she had no knowledge of eating disorders whatsoever. She had no medical training and certainly was no nurse or social worker! She had come two weeks previously to tell me that they were cutting down on visits. This was right after the first of August. She told me, actually, that she herself would stop being my worker and that someone else would come once a month because I didn’t need someone once a week anymore. I was deemed “low maintenance” by this CBFS worker who clearly didn’t even give a shit about me. I remember that day clearly. I wondered if the next week she’d even show up.

Hmm…so also, in my Mount Auburn records it states that I hadn’t seen Dr. P for months. Well, that’s sad. I’d seen her on her last day at Mass General, the last day she was there as hired staff. I believe the date was July 10th, 2013. I remember the entire appointment with her. It’s sad that apparently when she was contacted by Mount Auburn she didn’t even recall that she’d seen me that day.

I gave her a gift. It was a piece of writing. My computer had just crashed, so I was unable to print out the little story I wrote for her, my goodbye gift. So I recited the entire story I had written for her for memory, right in her office. Guess she forgot all that cuz Dr. P had over 100 patients and I didn’t matter anymore. Anyway, my records state I hadn’t been to see her for months, which wasn’t true. Also, Dr. P had asked me to try taking Abilify again. I reported to her, in this appointment, that I had indeed taken the Abilify and I told her that the Abilify had made me manic.

It was June 4, I believe, that she yelled at me in her office and demanded that I take Abilify. I did. I started it and had to stop after a few days because the drug caused mania. I have a friend who can vouch for this. Plus it’s in my blog! After only a few days on the drug, I was speaking rapidly, cracking inappropriate jokes, and I completely stopped sleeping. Even though I’d only been on it a brief time, I tapered off to avoid a mania crash. I crashed on the 18th or 19th of June, then after that, I was feeling much better in terms of mood and have certainly not touched Abilify since. I sure don’t want to get manic again! I refused it while in Mount Auburn for that reason, but they weren’t listening. However, Dr. P neglected to report all this to the Mount Auburn attending physicians when they contacted her.

In fact, I’ll bet there was no actual spoken conversation between them. I’ll bet it was just traded voicemail and not a real conversation anyway. I’ll bet she rushed off some message about how to watch out cuz I blog about any abuse they do to people, and therefore I pose a liability risk.

Do you hear me? LIABILITY RISK. I was no suicide risk, I was a liability risk for that damn hospital. The order stated that all I had to do was to show ANY sign, anything they could use as excuse to put 1:1 sitters on me, and they’d do it and then claim I was suicidal, which I wasn’t, but they needed an excuse to have them there.

Their excuses were rather loosely founded. I wasn’t agitated. Apparently, they put on the 1:1 sitters due to my vital signs and used that as excuse to claim I was suicidal. Some hocus-pocus excuse.

Also, my weight the morning of my admission, Aug 12, was XX pounds, and then, apparently, they weighed me using the bed as a scale. This is not an accurate way to measure a patient’s weight, not only that, they had these nearly illiterate sitters do the weights. Apparently, my weight showed up as about 20 pounds higher than it really was!

Okay, okay, I’ll tell you. I know it’s “triggering,” but I will. On Aug 12 I weighed 78. I am five foot one inch tall and I was 55 years old and I was so skinny, I looked like death warmed over. Had I been 30 or so, I wouldn’t have looked so bad, but at 55, I wasn’t going to live much longer at that weight. I do know that I could feel the life draining out of me over the next few days following my admission, and I was fairly certain that my weight most likely dropped to 75 or so, then climbed as I was finally able to eat and got hydrated via the IV.

However, the hospital personnel were poor judges of weight. How would they know? They said I was like 98 or so a few days following my admission. I recall one day I was weighed the person said one weight, then wrote down something entirely different, off by seven pounds! I knew half the time they were recording my weight sloppily, but there was so much to complain about that after a while I stopped caring about something such as whether or not they had my weight right. A person with anorexia sure isn’t sloppy about something like that! Not as sloppy as hospital personnel, and if anyone has an accurate scale…it would be a person with anorexia, of course! After I ended up full of edema, I was well up close to 100. That was when I was discharged. Much of the weight was in my lower body and my feet would not fit into shoes at all due to fluid retention.

I have not even talked about the actual abuse, only the records themselves and how records can be fudged to cover up patient abuse. They didn’t mention the illegal search of my apartment. They didn’t mention the name mixup. They didn’t mention the fact that the med list they had from the ER was many years old. Dr. P gave them the entirely wrong info regarding how long it had been since I’d seen her. I had told her exactly where I was going to go after ending my care with her, and by all means, she should have told them. I did tell Dr. P the name of my new PCP at Harvard Vanguard. I also told Dr. P that I had a therapist appointment at Harvard Vanguard in July, approximately one month following my last Dr. P appointment. I also had a psychiatrist appointment at Harvard Vanguard in September, already scheduled, September 13. I told this to Dr. P. I did, in fact, attend three therapy appointments at Harvard Vanguard, two in July and one in August, prior to my entry to Mount Auburn. All were grossly unsatisfactory because none knew a darned thing about eating disorders. Dr. P failed to tell this physician that I had had any follow-up care scheduled with Harvard Vanguard even though I had clearly told her these things. None of it.

I’ll bet you anything she just rushed off some voicemail saying I had a big mouth and was a liability problem and other than that, gave them no information that was at all helpful to ME. Only to protect them and their reputations, which are far more important, apparently, than my dignity or my life.

Also, the records at Mount Auburn state that I was so unreliable that I could not name my PCP. I had just met this PCP and she has a difficult name, difficult to spell and pronounce. I can pronounce her last name but to this day still have no clue how her first name is pronounced. Your guess is as good as mine! That plus I was in kidney failure! I went into full code! Is someone who is dying expected to recall a difficult-to-spell name of someone they just met a few weeks ago? Plus I was wearing a medic alert bracelet! I told the guys in the ambulance to access the bracelet info online (I was passing out) and they didn’t! I’d know if they had because it would show up in my online records via my medic alert bracelet account.

I would love to write to them and tell them just how badly their abuse has affected me.  I’d love to tell them about the REAL effect of what they did to me, the total lack of respect and how they stripped me of all my human dignity.  I cried every day for so long afterward.  I lost so many friends, so many people turned their backs on me, refusing to believe that “hospital abuse” really happens, but it does!

So….anyway, they blew it totally. I will never, ever set foot in that place again! And I won’t have to! Goodbye, assholes.  I will never have to see Mount Auburn again, or so I hope.  As I always say,

Never, ever shut up.

I love you all.