Better Late than Never
After my traumatic experience earlier this year at Washington Hospital Center, I sent a 4-page letter describing exactly what had happened and offering to be a reference for anyone else undergoing radioactive iodine treatment for thyroid cancer. Just yesterday, almost 2 months after my letter was sent, I received the following response from Douglas Van Nostrand, Director of Nuclear Medicine at WHC:********************************************************
I received your letter dated 27 January 2006 from Dr. Orlowski, Senior Vice President for Medical Affairs and Chief Medical Officer.
As Dr. Orlowski, I would like to extend my apologies for the unpleasant experiences that you encountered at Washington Hospital Center and specifically Nuclear Medicine. I also thank you for spending significant effort and time to chronicle your experiences.
Although we never are pleased to hear about these experiences, it is important that we do hear about them so that we can improve our patient experiences, our process, and our patient care. My objective is to have all of your experiences as well as all of our patients’ experiences in Nuclear Medicine like your pleasant experience on 24 January.
I have already initiated evaluating the various issues that you raised in Nuclear Medicine, and again, thank you for your input, suggestions, and time.
*********************************************************
I wonder who actually wrote this letter because some of it doesn’t even make sense.
I wonder if anything positive will really come out of this, or whether this is simply a pro forma letter to satisfy someone’s requirement that I be sent a response.
I wonder if they will ever take me up on my offer to be a reference for some poor soul headed for radioactive dosing.
I wonder what ever happened to my pajamas and other personal things that I left behind to decontaminate after my treatment. They were supposed to let me know when their half-life had been exhausted. I rather liked those pajamas.
But most of all I am happy to have this whole ordeal behind me. I am happy to be feeling well and strong and fully recovered. I marvel at the resilience of the body to heal and come back after we assault it with all sorts of invasive treatments.
posted by Barbara at 11:39 AM
4 Comments:
My cousin is pretty high up at WHC, and my ex-boyfriend is in Internal Medicine there. I hope neither of them had anything to do with your poor care!! I had no idea.
Let me know if there's any way I can help.
Kathryn -- WHC is a very big place, so it is unlikely that I encountered either of the people you know there. My whole reason for writing my letter was to tell them how to improve their process and to suggest that they set up a system to refer new patients to those of us who have been through this in the hope that it would not be so scary. I would be happy to share my letter with your cousin if he is interested...
I think, and Kathryn might know better than I, that a different department writes the letters. It's like the hospital PR department or something. I could be wrong though.
Just checking in here again. My cousin is Chief Resident in Internal Medicine there (about to finish his term, I think) and would likely be interested in your letter, particularly if his department were involved in any way.
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