More of My Experiences as Reg Nurse on health care topic

I want to preface these remarks to remind you that my R N license is in my name of Gloria Poole as it was during this event I am about to tell you about. I was married a second time for four years and ten months and that is when I started this blog. Because it has those years of my writing on it, I continue it even though I am divorced a second time and removed the Pappas name from my name by Court order.
I remind you of that in case people do background checking on me to see if I am telling you the truth. I am a Registered Nurse for a long time,and I though I do not work in nursing at present, I did for about 25 years or more. I want to add to the discussion on health care with this:
Years ago, I was the Administrative Supervisor of a Trauma-designated hospital, and in that job I had the duties of supervising all departments of the hospital and making decisions in the absence of the Administrator in the event of need to evacuate hospital, transfer patients to a different hospital if their needs could not be met at the one I worked for, making critical care decisions if the attending doctor could not be contacted,and making rounds on every unit of the hospital at least once a shift to 'eyeball' them and see how it was going on the units. One day one of the R.N.s on a particular unit paged me stat to come and see a patient on that unit that had suffered some sort of sudden event that was causing extreme shortness of breath, and blue nail-beds, and she was grabbing everyone that came by, clutching at them telling them she could not breathe. When I got to the unit, it was as described to me, and I quickly read the background medical info and realized that what she was admitted for, was not what she was experiencing at that moment. I paged her attending doctor, no immediate returned call. I paged the ER doctor, he was busy in ER. I thought based upon her symptoms and color of her fingernail beds that she was not getting enough oxygen and thought she may have thrown a pulmonary embolus. The ICU was the only place in the hospital that had the written guidelines [protocols] to intubate her without an additional doctor's order in the event she crashed totally and ceased to breathe or had cardiac arrest. I used my authority to write an order to move her to the ICU immediately and helped the floor nurses do that. She survived. Now, I wrote all of that to get to this point: the next day when the Administrator was back in her office, she called me to her office.She chewed me out. She said I should not have put that patient in the ICU. I asked why not since she met the medical criteria for that of impending event, obvious signs of respiratory distress, a sense of impending doom [she experienced and told everyone] and no contact with her doctor was imminent. The Administrator said to me, 'that woman has no insurance and the hospital will not get paid for her. What you did is cost the hospital money." I said, 'what I did was save the woman's life.' She said local authorities no longer want to pay for uninsured patients because the federal government has made it clear that they don't think they should have too. ' I said too bad. I am in the career to save lives not necessarily money'. She said, 'in the future she would expect me to make decisions on what is best for the hospitals' bottom line. " I said no, I would not, but what is best for human life." She said 'if i felt that way I might not be the best person for the job of Administrative Supervisor." I said, she might be right if she expected me to be a numbers cruncher first and not a nurse. And she said was that my decision? And I said, yes, and I quit. She was a business person not a nurse or a doctor, and her credentials were making money.
Now my other point is that local hospitals routinely provided for their local patients and local taxes supported them until the federal government got involved and started telling hospitals they were going to 'manage' health care and pay them for their losses. The federal government shifted the burden of all losses to communities to the national taxpayers instead of the local ones,and at the same time,they created a situation where any patient needed some sort of health care card [insurance pretender or something saying some third party would decide if they got paid or not] to be admitted to any part of the hospital. Then when that back-fired, they wrote another rule saying hospitals could not 'dump' critical patients, or transfer them to anywhere for any reason, unless fed approved [with their protocols instead of local ones or medical decisions]. Then when that back-fired because local ERs became reluctant to accept anyone into them for fear they would have to admit them for long term at their expense, they wrote more rules, and more rules and created more panels to decide who should get health care. And the needs of patients became further and further away from the priority and in the hands of government bureaucrats instead of in the hands of doctors and nurses, who had the training and expertise to make those decisions.
Now in Denver Colorado the ngo classes prepping people to choose death are already happening. They call it discussing 'end of life decisions' but it is setting people up to decide they would rather die a death they 'controlled' than fight for life. I HATE those sort of propaganda evil sessions. Do NOT ever sign away your life or your right to life to anyone. Do not go to sessions intended to persuade you that a peaceful drugged to death death is better than a natural one. Do not listen to those who think killing is a 'right'. GOD said killing is always a wrong when HE wrote in stone the words, "thou shalt not kill' that are recorded in Exodus 20:13, and also Deuteronomy.
/s/ Gloria Poole,R.N. and artist, Denver Colorado 80203 @ 7:57AM, 13-Aug-2009
Update at 8:36 AM after thinking on this some more, and realizing I could add more from my personal experiences as a patient in the past 3 years. In 2006 I suffered and survived a catatrosphic event of crashing down a flight of stairs when my then husband was violating the mandatory restraining order against him and had come to my aprt to 'prevent me from leaving the state' [he said] to attend my nieces's wedding in the state of Georgia. After hours of his harassment/ pressuring me/ arguing with me whether I had the 'right' to go if he could not go [he was on probation and could not get permission to leave the state] he told me to get in the car, but he had already told me he would kill me in the car and make it look like an accident. Anyway, I crashed down a flight of stairs and I had multiple fractures and a concussion.And he deliberately twisted my ankle after I said it was broken, to make it worst so I 'could not leave' he said. Though I went to the ER for the Univ of Colorado they did not want to give me any health care because I had no health care card so they dumped me after xraying me to tell me I had fractures but did not xray any part of me except my ankle that the EMT's had splinted. So they sent me home in a cab at my expense and I crawled up 28 steps like an infant to get home into a simi-safe place.Semi-safe because it was only safe as long as my then-husband was not there but he was often. The Univ of Colorado sent me home with multiple fractures and to a violent husband to avoid any expenses for me, though supposedly my then husband had insurance with his employer that he told me was required but apparently he not only told Univ of Colorado he had no insurance but that i was not his wife and he would not be responsible for me, or my bills, so they insisted I sign my own admission to ER form, but after they xrayed me to see that I had multiple fractures they realized they were not likely to get paid and so they discharged me home. I did not realize at the time how injured I was--it took a year to get to the point where I could find my way home --I would get lost, confused, disoriented, start crying, become overwhelmed with the slightest decision. It took another year to begin to think coherently and recognize misspelled words and backward letters. I am still having problems for that crash down those stairs. After that event, I had pneumonia,and I was reasonably sure it was because I had it years before and it felt the same and I went to the free clinic in lo-do Denver area, where the poor supposedly get health care since I had no money, no job, no support from then-separated husband who moved out when he fled the scene to avoid arrest when he injured me, and no hope of survival without some sort of intervention. I was crying hysterically. They diagnosed me as 'insane" I think, though i did not see my medical record --only knew what they prescribed--not antibiotics that I needed and they refused to look at my very swollen leg that had nails in it after I had had surgery to repair the fractures; but that surgery was not at the Univ of Colorado obviously.That would have cost the State of Colorado money! [I found an orthopedic doctor in the yellow pages and told him what happened and he helped me-he is a very good private doctor who helped me from the goodness of his heart, so the good deed I did years before was returned to me when he operated on me to save my ability to walk.]I am divorced from that violent bad man now and thank GOD! No one xrayed my head though my brain sloshed and no one would listen to me but say I was hysterical. I survived an event that almost killed me and a worst fall at an older age than Natasha Richardson who did not survive a fall.I am not ancient but older than she was.
Now back to the " free clinic" event in my life. I went to the free clinic from absolute desperation and needing intervention but they did not help me.I did not take their mind-altering drugs because they were harmful to me and dropped my BP but even though the nurse there told me it dropped my BP 30 pts, the Physicians Assistant told me that I just needed to continue to take it even though my BP fell so low I could not function and nearly collapsed from the one dose of it I did take. And they stuck their labels on me as poor, not worthy of real health care or of an xray for complaints in my chest, and ignored my physical injuries and physical complaints and incoherent speech, and told me I just needed those anti-pyschotic drugs. I did not need those. I needed antibiotics for recurrent pneumonia and I needed bedrest for my leg that was incredibly swollen and purplish at that time, and I probably also needed oxygen since by the time I did get some real medical attention my S.A.T. on my blood was below acceptable level for hospitalized patients. I felt like Alice who fell through the looking glass into the Mad_Hatters place of the underworld. Nothing made any sense to me, not the people, not the so-called health care clinic, and not the orders written for me. I had pneumonia for almost two months time and actually thought I might die of it, before I actually got any help. I have survived socialized medicine [the free clinics is the vision of the 'reformed' health care where they don't want to dispense any real medicine that might cause them legal problems so they tell everyone that they are psychotic and put them on mind altering drugs so they won't know when they steal from them]. I will never go back to that clinic ! And I will never tell anyone else too either. The reform of those clinics is a trend that started about 20 years ago when conscientous doctors wanted to help the poor and then the government got involved and wanted them to do 'cancer screening' to siphon off the money needed to pay for chest xrays for those who were sick to those who were not sick [mammograms]; and to pay for blood tests for those who had no cancer called cancer screening [PSAs I think is term for men]; but not to pay for blood testing to those who might have bacteria in their blood [as I did probably when sick]; and it put a government spin on health care because they are run by charities seeking government approval and not for the sake of the best for the sick or handicapped.
I could write a book on this and someday I hope to be able to do that. I have short sessions of 'productive' efforts and then long periods of rest still trying to get my life back on track somehow from events that should not have happened; and which the State of Colorado never saw fit to punish my now exhusband because they considered him employed and knew he was giving intimate massages to those in high ranking positions. But they considered me merely an unwanted exwife of no value to anyone.