Louis Silvers No doctor available to address serious issue and delayed treatement of severe HAI

Your Name: Louis Silvers

Patient’s Name/Relationship: same

City/State: Pompano Beach, FL.

When did event occur (what year)? 2016

Where did event occur? Acute Care General Hospital

What type of medical harm did you experience or witness? Healthcare-Acquired Infection

Please describe what happened. I was rushed into Broward General North on November 1, 2016 for what turned out to be a bowel obstruction. They put a an IV in my left arm which became infected within hours. During November 2nd, my arm swelled, got red, burned, and was painful. None of the nurses or doctors noticed this. It was around 7pm that 2 young nurses were trying to do a procedure when I told them about my arm and wanted the IV out. They took it out and left the room with an attitude. My mom and I took pictureS. The head nurse came in and looked at the arm and also took pictures,. She put the pick line in the right arm, but I was NOT given any antibioticics. The infection started to spread, my fever got higher as well as my blood pressure. The surgery kept getting postponed. On November 4th, they brought me down to radiation with 104 fever and had me swallow barium to see where the obstruction was. They were to take pictures every 30 minutes. I was there for 2 hours and the barium had not moved. The techs asked me to lay on my right side and within 10 minutes I started throwing up my own feces. The smell and taste were so bad I kept doing this for the next 4 hours. They immediately brought me back to the room where my mother was panicked because I had been gone so long and they had not gotten the results that had been ordered by the surgeon. Because I was hooked up to an IV I needed pans to throw up in and none of the nurses would come into the room and help my mom because the smell was so bad. They would leave the pans outside the room. They brought the xray machine into the room later that night to see where the barium had made it’s way to and then alerted the surgeon who made the decision to operate first thing in the morning. i WAS OPERATED ON THE 5TH WHICH WAS THE FIRST TIME i FINALLY RECEIVED ANY ANTIBIOTICS. The surgeon was so concerned for my health that instead of sutures, he stapled. In recovery, I told my mom I had a terrible migraine and my eyes were killing me. She had the surgeon paged and 4 hours later they did a brain ct to see if I had had a stroke during the surgery. I had not. But when I woke up the next morning, Sunday November 6th in ICU I was blind in BOTH eyes, had pneumonia, and a blood clot that went from my left jugular down to my left wrist. 18 inches! and 2 pinched nerves in my neck. My 80 year old mom was asking for an ophthalmologist or eye surgeon and they kept telling her they did not have one on call. She asked to speak to the case worker, the president, the surgeon and no one would help her. She told them she was going to wheel me out and take me to the RAND EYE INSTITUTE which was one block away and they threatened that if she took me out of the hospital I would not be allowed back. It wasn’t until November 13th, that a wonderful nurse got her ophthalmologist to come in and take a look at my eyes. All he could tell my mom was there was definitely a problem and I needed to see someone as soon as I was released. They released me on the 14th and on the 16th I was rushed to a retinologist who declared that indeed there was an infection in both eyes. I was immediately treated with 4 injections of antibiotics in each eye and was operated on the right eye on the next day November 17th 2016. I would then have to have a vitrectomy on the left eye on March 9th, 2017. I had to live with my mother for 5 months because I could not see or lift things in the left arm because of the blood clot. I would never be able to wear glasses again and only use a certain special kind of contact lens to see. I would have to wear them at all waking hours to be able to get around. It took 7 months to get rid of the blood clot. And on March 8, 2018 I had a detached right retina which was caused because of the infection making my retina so weak. As I am writing this, I only have my left eye. The right eye has not come back fully and looking at letters or lines are wavy.

What was the outcome of the medical harm issue? Permanent disability