When bloopers aren’t that funny…

This is a follow on piece from the ‘Bloopers’ topic of the other night. One of the bloopers turned sour in a big way, so I thought I should complete the picture. I guess it shouldn’t be a shock that bloopers in healthcare aren’t too funny, mostly. Some are interesting, some awful, and a few hilarious; that’s about how it works out, it seems.

You know that guy I was telling you about, the one with shoulder bursitis? The one whose wife and daughter gave him too much ibuprofen and paracetamol unintentionally, dosing him every 4 hours on the hour for several days due to his excruciating pain without observing the 24 hour maximum doses because they weren’t told about it by their doctor? And obviously they weren’t told about the maximum doses by pharmacy staff either if they bought the medication in a pharmacy, or maybe they bought it from the supermarket; this is my strong argument that these “simple” pain killers not be available from the supermarket. I guess the family never read the packet either, although English as a second language was a factor here for the wife, but not the daughter. This is the patient who was brought into ED after he started coughing up blood as a side effect of ibuprofen which irritates the stomach lining. You’ll remember that the family who wouldn’t give him the stronger pain killer Endone in case he got constipated, but had given him toxic doses of weaker pain killers. The patient who is an example of people being given incomplete advice about how to take their medications, and blindly following that advice without taking any initiative themselves.

Well, he died.

I saw him Saturday, he died early Monday morning. I was shocked when I found out!! I knew what they’d done was bad, and that he was going to suffer the consequences, but I never expected him to die! Not that fast, certainly. I planned on looking up which ward he was in in Monday morning so that I could handover the story to the ward pharmacist, but then it said: DECEASED. I had to read it twice. I thought I’d picked the wrong patient. But no, deceased, 0600 hours, 16-4-2018.

Wow!

So I looked into it. And right there as the cause of death: acute on chronic renal failure precipitated by NSAID use. That’s non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs: ibuprofen (Nurofen), diclofenac (Voltaren) etc. Acute on chronic means he had a degree of chronic permanent kidney failure that couldn’t be reversed, not unexpected at 77 yo, but it was made acutely much worse by something, in this case medication.

There are a few things you can do to help reverse acute kidney failure: give IV fluids to flush toxins out, stop all medications that are toxic to the kidneys, manage blood pressure with medication and fluid so that the kidneys have optimal perfusion, but at the end of the day there’s only so much that can be done without the patient going to the intensive care unit and being put on dialysis. Once the kidneys go off, fluid accumulates in the body. This patient already had heart failure which causes fluid to gather around the heart and lungs, and the kidneys failing to clear fluid adds additional pressure on the heart. This was listed as the secondary cause of death: heart failure. In fact 4 causes of death were described in more detail than the overall cause as I’ve put it above, acute on chronic kidney failure precipitated by NSAIDs: kidney failure, heart failure, NSAIDS and age. Once the snowball got kicked off it gathered momentum from pretty much every other medical condition that the patient already had, unsurprising since the whole body is in a delicate balance. But if that trigger hadn’t been there…

In this case because of his age and many other medical conditions, the family did the sensible thing and let things be as they would be; and in this case death is what would be. It’s a shame that kind of common sense thinking hadn’t prevailed any earlier in the case. I feel like this death could be listed as preventable.

If a patient asks me generally whether ibuprofen is good for them, there are several medical conditions I’d want to be sure the patient didn’t have before recommending it: asthma, stomach problems like previous ulcers or gastritis and even reflux, heart failure and kidney failure. So the ibuprofen probably shouldn’t have been started in the first place; a steroidal anti-inflammatory like prednisolone would have been more appropriate. Although sometimes we say cautiously, take it but for no more than x days. Of course we then also tell the patient the maximum dose and how best to take it. In this case I’m pretty sure if you had asked the patient’s cardiologist or nephrologist before hand whether this man should have been given a NSAID they would NEVER have signed off on it.

Then maybe he’d still be here, a bit fuzzy headed or nauseous on Endone, taking paracetamol less regularly than actually happened, and blood sugars high from prednisolone, but alive, his bursitis improving and his life going on at home.

RIP.

I’m sorry the system let you down.

The end

A medication order comes to the dispensary late in the day. It’s from the adult psychiatric ward, who only have an attending clinical pharmacist for half of the day, and a pager service for the rest of the day. Because the order is up to the 7th day and the bottom of the page is initialed by ward pharmacists from 3 different days that show they have reviewed the whole chart, it seems straight forward to supply with no need to page the busy ward pharmacist. Especially as the last initial was from the day prior. This shows me that all of the  work has been done to make sure the order is safe, appropriate, avoids their allergies, is monitored as necessary and is okay with all of the other medications. Not a lot of people see the work that pharmacists do to keep them safe while they’re in hospital, but those 2 letters at the bottom of the medication chart mean a great deal!

I go to dispense the medication in our software, and it comes up that the patient is in the oncology ward! Confusing, since the order clearly has the psych ward written on it. So I ask the oncology pharmacist and get a story like no other that I’ve heard yet!

This patient has met SCLC. That’s medical shorthand for advanced lung cancer that was possibly incurable from the the start, most likely caused by smoking, which has spread from the lungs throughout the body via the blood stream and deposited in the usual place that lung cancer goes to: the brain. Isn’t medical terminology amazing? 7 letters that tell me all of that!!

When a cancer spreads the medical term is that it metastasises. The cancer clumps that have spread away from the primary, or first discovered/diagnosed cancer are known as metastases, shortened to mets. This patient has brain mets. The cancer has spread from the lungs into the bloodstream and traveled around the body before settling in the brain and growing there. This is now a secondary cancer because it has come from the primary cancer. We can prove this by taking samples of both cancers; they will have the same histology or cell type, and the same structure and growth pattern. Each type of cancer has a typical pattern of where the mets will appear. Patients with lung cancer will be screened for brain mets. Breast cancer patients will be scanned for bone mets and etc.

I sometimes hear or read of people saying that a person has breast cancer and bone cancer and brain cancer, as though they were 3 different types. The odds of that are really absurb; it’s a once in a lifetime patient sort of odds. Much more likely, it’s breast cancer which has spread to the bone and then the brain. That’s nothing to do with the anything, just something that I’d like people to know.

SO getting back to the story! Our patient has advanced, likely to be life-ending lung cancer that has spread throughout the body and has established in the brain. At this point they cannot be cured of their cancer without very extensive surgery to remove the cancerous lung and brain tissue, and severe chemotherapy and radiation therapy…and even then it’s doubtful! And its a very high cost to pay, especially removing part or all of the lung/s and part of the brain!! Brain and lung surgery? And possible transplant to replace them? for no guarantee? It would be a very brave doctor to recommend that course of treament, unless the patient were very young and fit…which is unlikely given this cancer is caused by smoking.

So at this point we offer palliative care, or end-of-life care, or comfort care. Or try to.

Usually we try to get the patient back home with the appropriate supports of doctors visits to the home or at their usual clinic, nursing care in the home if the patient can’t do for themselves, plenty of medications and basically whatever it is that they’d most like to fill their final days or weeks or months with. If they can’t be sent home we at least give them a private room, unlimited family visits, their little dog/cat coming in, vases for flowers, unobtrusive nursing care and medications, comforting doctors rounds, limiting anything not fully essential like blood tests or blood pressure checks, and again, basically whatever they want that is feasible.

Once we had a wedding, in the patient’s garden around the side with the couples children and close family then day leave and permission for one alcoholic beverage. She died 3 days later at 40 something. Everyone cried about the wedding, either at it, or thinking about it, or seeing her come in from home in her wedding dress on oxygen holding her kids hands.

I’ve seen patients is deep distress changing completely when their little dog is brought in. They coo and talk to it, cuddle it, put their face next to it, and just relax so much. It’s such a tear jerking experience! The change in them, that peace, all that matters is they’ve seen their little dog and it’s going to be okay, and all is okay with the patient somehow.

But in this case, that isn’t going to be an option as such. In this unfortunate patient, the cancerous growth of the brain mets has set off a full blown psychosis! The pressure of  the extra growth onto the brain stretching the brain sac, the location of the mets pushing on certain areas of the brain, physical and chemical changes etc can cause different symptoms like confusion, delerium but I’ve never heard of this before. Think hallucinations, delusions, aggression and violence…such that the oncology ward wasn’t able to deal with the patient anymore and they’ve been sent to the psych ward! That’s not the place for comfort care, for a nice big room with flowers and family spending quality time at the end of life. Instead it’ll be sedation, anti-psychotics, possibly restraints, surrounded by other disturbed patients in an environment that’s hardly welcoming.

And that’s how little control we have over the end of our lives.

Medical conditions eventually get us all, one way or another. I think we should recognise that. We will all die of a medical condition, and can I add, or mental health condition. And we don’t have a lot of control over any of it!

Now it’s full psychosis as a result of lung cancer as a result of smoking.

It might be kidney failure and second daily dialysis as a result of diabetes as a result of a fatty diet.

It might be suicide as a result of desperation as a result of depression.

Where is the control?

So wouldn’t it be nice if we thought of them all the same?

I would love to live in a world where no one ever described death by suicide as selfish.

Because if we can call suicide selfish, what on earth would we call the death due to smoking or a bad diet?? We feel very emotional about the unfairness and randomness of cancer, but is that really in line with how we think about suicide? Depression can be very random and is never fair. It distresses us to see patients on dialysis and in the inevitable spiral to death that comes with kidney disease, but isn’t that just exactly how we could describe the progress of an unwell patient with insufficiently treated depression?

I’d prefer there be no blame on anyone.

As a fatty who is struggling to exercise and diet through her medication haze and bipolar up and down blips, am I really going to say I told you so to diabetes, high cholesterol, and all the consequences thereof, stroke, heart attack, high blood pressure, kidney failure to name a few?

As a depressive who has spent 3 years trying, trying, trying through all the low mood, low motivation, low energy, low self esteem, low interest, low care and everything that comes in that huge big black box, I certainly can never blame anyone who just couldn’t take it anymore, and doesn’t know how else to escape but through death.

The smoking one I’m still in debate with myself over. I guess because I’ve never smoked and I’ve never had to quit, I can much more easily see why it’s a bad idea. However, my judgement is reserved for those who didn’t know it was bad when they took up the habit. People who grew up in my era (can I call it an era yet?) know it’s bad, and took it up anywhere. But again, because my mind sees all angles, I realise that there could still be a lot of factors as to why they did take it up: parents who smoked, peer pressure left over from the 90s, depression/anxiety, and a bunch more. Point being, I don’t think you should smoke but I do know it can be incredibly hard to stop, just like the gym is something I should do and find hard to!

My aim for us all: let’s work together to realise that in the end, we quit, we exercise, we try, but that’s not a guarantee, just a higher likelihood of control.