Deja-vu all over again

Yesterday (Thursday) morning, Dad was told that they wanted to place a new and improved type of GI tube in his stomach (I don't have all the details, but as I understand it, this one would go in deeper and would have both an input and output tube). Dad agreed to this procedure, hoping it would help with his absorption--he's getting so little nutrition at the moment because he's just not able to absorb much. So what did they do? Took him off the SAME medication that they forgot to reinstate after his surgery, the one whose absence caused all the fibrillation problems last week. Well, as anyone who has taken seventh grade science knows, you can't expect to try the same thing again and get a different result. Sure enough, by the afternoon he was back to fibrillating, heart rate up in the 170's, blood pressure going low. Of course once this happens they can't just quickly give him the proper medication and have everything back to normal. First they have to monitor him for a while, give him fluids, take his vitals, move him to the cardiac step-down unit, get his blood pressure up, etc. They finally gave him this medication around 6:30 p.m. Mom stayed all night again and reported this morning that his heart rate still wasn't steady, but at least when it was high it wasn't quite so high (more like the 140's).

If I have anything to say about it, he's staying on the second floor (the cardiac step-down unit) where the nurses are attentive and seem to have a good deal of common sense and intelligence. I'll forgive one error, but not the same dangerous mistake twice in as many weeks. They also say there was no reason for him to be taken off his medication; even if they were concerned about making sure his stomach was empty prior to this procedure (surely a moot point; he has a tube into his stomach and they can just drain it if they need to!), they could have given him the medication through an IV. And of course because of the fibrillation, they now have to wait until he is stable again before they can try this procedure, which means another length of time with little or no nutrition. It's hard to know how much these stupid errors may cost, both in financial terms (all that time in CCU and the procedures yesterday can't be cheap) and in terms of his overall recovery. I don't know who is luckier--Dad that he's managed to live through these mistakes or the doctors that we aren't all taking a good long look at the full-color attorney ads on the back of the Yellow Pages.