Your loved one’s stay in a Texas hospital may have been brief, but within days of returning to the nursing home, he or she began to complain of pain and discomfort. Before you knew it, the nursing home staff called an ambulance to take your parent back to the hospital, this time to fight to stay alive.
As common as urinary tract infections are in the elderly, there is no excuse for an elder care medical team to miss the signs that your loved one was in distress. If your loved one suffered serious injury or died as a result of an unchecked urinary tract infection, you have every right to want answers.
Recognizable symptoms of a UTI
Because of the weakened conditions of the organs of many elderly residents and the compromised immune systems from which many older patients suffer, the frequency of UTIs is high in both men and women. Coupled with the high risk of infection even a healthy person faces when a hospital stay requires the use of a catheter, you have a recipe for tragedy.
UTIs may come from exposure to the staphylococci bacteria which can be introduced into an already vulnerable area through the insertion of a catheter. Within a matter of days, usually soon after your loved one is released from the hospital, the symptoms begin, including these:
- Fever
- Sweating, shaking and chills
- Frequent and painful urination
- Blood and strong odor in the urine
- Feelings of pelvic pressure
Your loved one’s immune system may have been too weak to fight off the infection. This is why is it crucial to catch and treat a UTI quickly. Left untreated, your loved one’s UTI may result in recurring infections, kidney damage and life-threatening sepsis. If your parent was unable to communicate, he or she may not have been able to inform the medical staff of the symptoms. However, a trained and observant nursing home team should have noticed the obvious indicators that your loved one was suffering.
If your loved one’s UTI infection began after a hospital visit and worsened under the care of a nursing home staff, you may feel many emotions and have many questions. A skilled attorney can assist you in finding the answers and deciding the best direction in which to move forward to hold the responsible people liable for the terrible mistakes that caused your loved one so much pain.