posted by Kyle on Jul 8
I could write 100 posts with this same title. Holberton Hospital (St. John’s, Antigua) is the most disgusting excuse for a hospital that I have ever seen. I really mean that, and I have seen a lot of really bad third world hospitals. Public Hospitals in Ghana (where I volunteered two summers ago), a nation with a per capita income of just over $500 per year, had higher standards of care than this place!
Why? Because, with very few exceptions, the staff doesn’t care one bit about how they do their jobs or the welfare of their patients.
A couple of weeks ago, a call went out on the radio all over Antigua pleading for blood for a patient at Holberton. Apparently, they were out of blood and this patient was critical. Given that I have O- blood, and hadn’t donated for three months, and was completely well, I decided to set aside my studies and go there and donate blood. I filled out the form, and the “nurse” reviewed it, got a worried look on her face, and knocked on the door of a doctor. He looked at my form and concluded that I was an unsuitable donor. I walked into his office to speak to him.
According to him, because I take lexapro, I am an unsuitable blood donor. I asked him, in the most polite fashion, why that is (all the while knowing that he is wrong). He tried to feed me a line about the fact that he didn’t know whether they’d be giving the patient whole blood or plasma. This is, of course, irrelevant. I proceeded to ask him a very pointed question:
Do you know what Lexapro is?
He gave me a blank stare, and then told me that his is a pathologist, not a clinician. When I opened my mouth to say something else, he waved me off with his hand. So, I left.
There was a man, in critical need of blood, and this doctor turned away a willing and suitable donor because he didn’t know what Lexapro is. He could have, of course, opened a book, or typed in a search on google. He could have even asked me to BRING him a textbook from the medical school library so he could verify that I am a suitable donor. Instead, he waved me off, more interested in whatever else he was doing (or, more likely, not doing) than obtaining blood for a critical patient.
I don’t know of a even single first year medical student who doesn’t know what Lexapro is. It is an incredibly common drug. There are references made to it in movies (i.e. sideways). I’ll give him a pass, though, since he is a pathologist and he practices in a country where the only people who take it are expats who would, in the face of an MI, go to the airport instead of his hospital.
What I cannot set aside, is the fact that he was unwilling to look it up. This wasn’t just some routine donation while they had a full blood bank. The blood bank didn’t have any of this guy’s blood type! I don’t know what happened to this patient. I hope that they found another suitable donor in time, but that is by no means guaranteed. This doctor’s unwillingness to spend five minutes looking up a drug could have cost a patient his life. That is disgusting. That is Holberton.
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