[BuckRoger]

and those doctors are always the same! do nothing

[XxMutilatedxX]

Great find... poor guy So unfortunate how careless they handled that

[Pyramid_Head]

Hope his family presses charges

[HouseAtreides]

Wow...this actually sounds A LOT like what happened to my uncle.

[FavaBeans]

Well he dead

[CuriousGeorge420]

Originally Posted by Sharon76 ↗

That was my fault with wrong wordage, he had TB as well as a fatal abdominal infection

It baffles me how it was missed!

I had quite a serious infection once that took years to resolve due to misdiagnosis and eventually I ended up needing surgery as a result.

My point is these kind of misdiagnoses can happen anywhere and are probably a result of overwork by the doctors. I was lucky my condition was not so quickly fatal.

[Rocknut]

Same thing happened to my wife here in the US, went to the ER for abdominal pains twice, sent her home with a laxative. Still experiencing pain, she would take what her doctor said as "a proper diagnosis" and carried on in pain. Well, she is a school teacher and in the middle of class she collapsed in agony throwing up from every opening in her body, she had acute pancreaitis needed immediate emergency surgery to remove her gall bladder. Hmm guess what no more abdominal pains.

[Sniper308]

Originally Posted by HelloNurse! ↗

I'm surprised they wouldn't have done a CT of the abdomen.

Abdominal pain is some of the hardest things to diagnose, mainly because there are so many diagnosis' to look at. It's also the #1 thing drug abusers complain of when they are trying to get IV pain medication.

Given the fact he had TB leads me to believe this might be part of the background story..as drug abuser are more prone to TB due to lowered immune systems..

Not that this is what should have been done.. But my bet is this guy was probably what ER's like to call a "frequent flyer" comes in c/o abdominal pain, gets his IV pain meds and gets sent on his way. The receptionist, seeing him all the time, decided nope, not going to entertain that idea today. And told him to leave..

Sad that this actually happens all the time..

Here's some of my thoughts about this case:
1.) The patient was in India and may not have had access to expensive equipment like a CT scanner. Plus, I hate to say it, they may not want to order expensive tests like a CT if the patient cannot pay. A few friends did not have insurance or had state insurance and could not get treatment even though there was definite evidence that they needed treatment.
2.) The autopsy looks more like a septic bowel (which is when a portion of the intestine dies and releases all kinds of nasties into the system, the least which is bacteria and toxins which rapidly overpower the body (the intestines are the route many nutrients enter the body through the bloodstream and are highly vascularized). The blood labs said that the white blood cell count was normal (thus not reacting to an infection). Severe sepsis will cause death within 72 hours even in a hospital environment. I don't see any pus which would indicate extensive infection (and little inflammation of the surrounding tissues. I also think it was not an infection of the bowel because the abdomen was soft, and the report seemed to indicate that the patient didn't react significantly upon palpation. Typically a severe infection of this area would put the patient on the ceiling with pain.
3.) TB has various stages. Early stages the person may present asymptomatic, and just be a vector for infection (similar to how people are most infections of a flu just prior to showing symptoms). Later stages, the patient coughs up bloody sputum, more and more frequently at the end.
4.) We don't know this guys medical history. He may have been someone who goes to the ER for pain medication and the triage nurse (person who is responsible for the initial screening and sorting the priorities to take back to the ER rooms) may have thought this was a repeat of pain medication shopping.
In light of the labs and preliminary examination, I can see how it could be misdiagnosed. I'd venture that the guy also had an extremely high pain threshold which made the doctors and nurses think the problem wasn't so severe. High pain thresholds are great dealing with the pain but really worked against this guy this time once he got to the ER.
I'm no doctor or "receptionist" but have been around medicine a very long time.

[nstonerider76]

He likely died of sepsis,he probably had some sort of gastric leak which incubated this highly deadly bacteria. It only takes days for sepsis to shut down and kill all the organs in your body. So very strange that a CBC did not find elevated white blood cells and culture slides could have been preformed. And TB is very contagious, but that’s not what he died from. The purulent fluid in his abdomen cavity is sepsis and his own body basically poisoned itself.