Raccoon update

[tblue37]

360. Aerows, I am so glad you are going to be OK. I also hope you will complain to

the hospital itself and also to your county and state health departments. If that raccoon happened to be rabid, what they did in that ER could have led you to an agonizing death.

Frankly, I doubt that it was rabid, but since raccoons are a well-known rabies vector—and even many laypersons are well aware of that fact, as the posts on this thread show, so medical professionals certainly should be!—the doctor should always assume that the animal was rabid, especially since mere contact with saliva can spread the disease if you have even a tiny wound on your hand, like winter-chapped skin, for example.

If the raccoon was rabid, and especially since its bite broke skin, that would mean that you had only a limited time frame to begin the shot series, without which you would certainly die. But since they not only failed to begin rabies treatment, but actually acted as though your concerns were foolish, their snottiness would have prevented you from following through and getting the rabies shots if you had not reported the situation on DU and gotten the advice of so many DUers (and the invaluable help of MineralMan).

Just imagine what would have happened if you had not had the input of the DUers who warned you to get the shots and who also made it clear that the butt shot they gave you was certainly not a rabies shot, but merely an antibiotic.

Your expereince really upsets me because of something that happened here in our town over the Labor Day weekend. A 19-year-old boy committed suicide that Sunday morning. His therapist wouldn’t take phone calls over the holiday weekend, so the mother’s frantic calls just went to a voicemail that said the therapist would call back on Tuesday morning. Then the mother took her son to the ER, but the medical professionals at the ER also failed to follow standard protocol—and again, that protocol is so well-known that even most laypersons are well aware of it!

Instead of having a mental health professional there or at least on call for crisis situations like that, which is what most hospitals in a city this size would do, the stupid ER doctor called the cops on the kid!

Well, we know that is the worst possible thing to do, because of all the horror stories we’ve seen about how cops are likely to kill suicidal people when their families make the mistake of calling for help to prevent the suicide.

Those cops treated the boy as though he were a criminal, aggressively interrogating him for two hours! He was made to feel ashamed and embarrassed, so finally he just begged his mother to take him home. As they left, the desperate mother asked the doctor what she was supposed to do. He responded with a stupid cliché, “Just be there for him.”

When an adolescent who is already under care for depression presents in an ER with open suicidal ideation, he doesn’t need to be bullied by cops. He needs a competent therapist, and probably also to be temporarily admitted as a potential danger to himself.

The mother did everything she could, but the boy’s therapist failed to follow standard procedure when she went incommunicado over the long holiday weekend without providing her patients with a lifeline number or a way to reach a cooperating colleague in case of crisis. Holidays, weekends, and late nights are especially dangerous to people who suffer from suicidal depression, and this ER visit hit the trifecta: it occurred near midnight on a holiday weekend.

The hospital was equally at fault, of course. How on earth could the ER in a city this size not have a mental health professional at least on call just because it was late at night on a holiday weekend?

The most bizarre part of the doctor’s calling in the cops is that it was in our city that the cops killed Greg Sevier, a young Native American man whose parents had called them to help their son, because they feared he would kill himself.

Greg, a severe depressive, had locked himself in the bedroom with a knife. When the cops came, they didn’t talk or anything. They went right to kicking down the door. When Greg startled and stood up from where he was sitting on the bed with the knife in his hand (he did not move toward them—he just stood up as a result of being startled), one of the cops immediately drew his gun and killed him. (This case was actually rather famous when it occurred.)

I think you should complain to the county and state health departments, as well as to the hospital itself. Those ER idiots need to learn how to handle a case of possible rabies before their ignorance kills someone!