Interaction with professionals – Sheni

 

Sheni describes two occasions where she had a disagreement with the doctors.

Transcript

But one of the things that they did was they had, they had [an associate doctor]. He was working the nightshift one night and he suggested that they should just take out the shunt to help get rid of the infection. And we thought that was a really, really bad idea because if he had a shunt, he must need a shunt. And this doctor said “Well, that’s not necessarily true. Maybe he doesn’t need it anymore, and this might hasten the recovery from the meningitis.” So, we reluctantly said “Okay. Well, as long as you’re going to watch him really carefully then okay, fine. But if he starts looking like he needs the shunt put back in, you need to promise us that you’re going to act quickly on that.” So he assured us that he would, and that was on, I believe it was on a Friday, and by that weekend he, my husband, was acting fine when we visited him at the hospital. And then, I went home Sunday night thinking that everything was okay. But then, I got a call at around 7:30 in the morning from [his neurosurgeon] saying that he was #4 on the coma scale; he had gone into a coma and they needed to insert a temporary shunt immediately at his bedside in order to save his life.

In fall of 2000… or sorry the spring of 2010, not long after he finished chemo, he started having lot of weird things started happening. He started having problems with his—the tumour is on the right-hand side of his brain—had a lot of problems with his left hand and arm and his face; they would start going numb on him. And we had a number of situations where we had to take him to the hospital, and because of this, knowing that the tumour is on the right side and this was happening on the left side, it’s never happened before, I started thinking the tumour has grown. So, I start mentioning this to different doctors and they are like “No, no, no. You’re over-reacting,” right.


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