My father was diagnosed with nephrosis of his right kidney and his urologist sent him to have a stent placed in the right kidney (he has had one in the left kidney for over a year now-gets changed every 6 months.) For some reason, the radiologist put in a nephrostomy tube for drainage from his back, and put the stent in part of the way, but only part of the way. He has to go back next week for them to "fish it out" through the stoma.
Is there any known reason why having this procedure for his right kidney would cause the left kidney to shut down? No urine is coming into his pouch at all and hasn't been since right after the procedure yesterday. Right kidney drains into the nephrostomy bag and is producing a lot, left kidney is supposed to drain through the stent, out the stoma and into the pouch. Nothing is coming out there. He says he is not in pain and is not running a fever.
We called the uro's office to report this and the nurse said she would talk to the doctor and get back to us. Wonder when that's going to happen?? I sent an email to the doctor describing this but haven't heard back from him. So finally we called the answering service to see if we could actually talk to a doctor and, of course, since it is a teaching hospital, a resident was on call and called me back. No disrespect intended, but he didn't know anything! He did say he would email our doctor and if he didn't hear from him, he would page him. Gee thanks. I told this resident that it would be nice to get something resolved before the weekend.
UT Southwestern in Dallas is a great place. However, Dad had his procedure done in one of the hospitals where radiology procedures are done and there is no urology department there. It turned out that the radiologist wanted to keep him there overnight (not expected by us) so he was admitted. Turns out urology admitted him and today when we were trying to leave, there were no urologists there to sign the dismissal papers. Seems they are in an entirely DIFFERENT hospital! So, no uro ever saw him while he was there, nor did the radiologist come to check on him. She was working at yet another hospital today. Our mistake was not demanding that Dad was seen by a urologist before leaving the hospital to address the problem of no urine being produced.
I am yet again amazed at how little the nurses know about urostomies. When Dad would tell them that no urine was coming out, the replies varied from "your kidney is not awake yet" to "that's because one end is higher than the other." Well, only conscious sedation was used for the procedure and as for one end being higher than the other...what the heck does that mean??? If one more person asked him if he needed to "use the bathroom" I was going to scream. Okay, we were on a cardiac floor, but isn't info about stomas being taught in nursing schools these days??
Sorry for the rant, but medical care to me feels like when you take your car in to get one thing fixed and they end up breaking two other things. Dad's left kidney was working great before he had the procedure to put the nephrostomy tube and stent in the other kidney. I'm just frustrated.
