Asklemmy

I've been lucky with having good doctors, but my best friend OTOH ... I took her to an ER because she had severe back pain for no reason. She's diabetic, and I noticed one of her toes looked black. I pointed this out to the doctor, who dismissed it. She said my friend just needed some pain killers for strained muscles. As we were sitting in a drivethru waiting to pick up the prescription, my friend was getting worse, so I took her to a different ER. They said she was just constipated and gave her some laxatives. Two days later she is screaming in pain, can barely move, and is shitting herself from the laxatives. We take her to a third hospital ER and insist she be admitted. She lay in a hospital bed for days with no diagnosis. Finally when she fell and they realized her legs were paralyzed, they did an MRI and found she was nearly dead of sepsis and had three abscesses along her spine.

They put her on strong IV antibiotics and did surgery to clean the abscesses -- telling her she only had a 20% chance of surviving the surgery and would probably never walk again. Four months later, after learning to walk again, she finally went home. She still has chronic back pain and adhesions from the surgery.

All from an infected toe that doctors couldn't be bothered to check out.