Is removing all meds a common hospital experience, or does this hospital have issues

[DebJ]

17. Update: Bad news. He went horribly manic, just like I said he would.

He kept taking the Celexa, because he liked the high of it. He went extremely manic. Now he will be in the hospital for several more days.

He is off the Celexa now, and has a different doctor there.

On Saturday, I had called each shift and spoken to his nurses to warn them that he could go from smiling silly to dangerous in 10 seconds flat, and I asked at each shift if the doctor had changed any of his medications. The first shift I called I had advised of the problem with SSRI's and asked them to tell the doctor. At shift change I called, and the doctor hadn't finished his paperwork for the day, no changes. So I called the next shift, to find still no changes, and to warn the nurses again. In the morning, I called again. And yes, I was upset at each call, but I didn't yell at the nurses, who after all have no authority. I expressed my distress over the damage being done to my son's brain while I stood helplessly by.

My last call to them, I said I wanted to know why a doctor would continue to prescribe a class of meds for a patient after he had been told this patient had a prior medical history of extremely bad results that had caused his first hospitalization. I said I wanted to hear the doctor's medical reasons for doing this. The nurse's response was to say the Social "Worker Brian would take care of that (speaking for the Invisible Omnipotent God-Doctor), I presumed.

I spoke to Brian yesterday. Of course he didn't tell me the answer to my question, though I repeated it many times. He said that he was advocating for my son's release from the hospital yesterday, and Brian and my son said he wasn't going to take the Celexa, but only because I was so upset, and that my son wouldn't be seeing his regular psych til Aug 31. That concerned me.

Turns out that right after that he went ballistic manic and so he won't be getting out.

I will be contacting the hospital in the next week.

I can't do it right now because yesterday my BP was 180/100 and I went to the ER at our hospital (different one) with terrible pain down my left arm, chest tightness, nausea, chills, and just generally feeling hideous. Before we went to the ER I took an extra one of my BP meds (and extra 1/2 days dose)...I had asked my doc about that one other time and she said ok, so I took the risk and did it this time. After sitting in the ER for about 45 minutes, they took my vitals and did an EKG. I noticed that the machine said my BP was down to 132/88. The ER put us back in the waiting room. After sitting there for 4 hours waiting for a doctor to read my EKG, a migraine was starting from the bright lighting, the loud discussions from a group of young girls and from a family trying to calm down a poor elderly woman suffering horribly from dementia and Sundowners syndrome, and a man loudly playing videos on his phone....for four hours of this. One young woman was miscarrying at 13 weeks and she had been sitting in a wheelchair with no attention for 6 hours...why wasn't she upstairs in OB/GYN? Plus a woman near us was vomiting loudly and profusely several times an hour . She left without ever being seen after waiting for hours. We left after four hours. I figured I wasn't dead yet, and if I kept sitting there, my BP was going to escalate again from the migraine that was trying to start. I needed to get into a bed and have some quiet. So we went home and let God roll the dice.

Kind of scary to go to the ER with those symptoms and not be able to see a doctor at all for 4 hours, or get a bed to lie down in at least. It's damn uncomfortable sitting upright in those chairs for hours. I'm not at all comfortable about the status of U.S. medical care at this point.