Post by redheadbaker on Dec 28, 2013 15:27:20 GMT -5
I think her excuse is lame as there is no evidence that the flu shot carries a risk of miscarriage (but the flu does), but I do think she should have been allowed to wear a mask instead.
Pregnant Nurse Fired In Pennsylvania Over Flu Shot
LANCASTER, Pa. (AP) — A pregnant woman who refused to get a flu shot due to her fear of miscarrying has been fired from her job with a health care company.
Dreonna Breton worked as a registered nurse for Horizons Healthcare Services in central Pennsylvania. The company requires all personnel to get the influenza vaccine.
Breton contends the immunizations may not be safe enough for pregnant women. She suffered two miscarriages earlier this year, and doesn’t want to risk a third.
Company spokesman Alan Peterson says it’s unconscionable for a health care worker not to be immunized. He also says pregnant women are more susceptible to the flu.
Breton offered to wear a mask during flu season. But the 29-year-old was fired Dec. 17.
Federal officials say the flu causes about 200,000 hospitalizations annually.
I was encouraged to get a flu shot while pregnant moreso than any other time in my life. If a nurse isn't smart enough to analyze risk and make necessary health decisions with the best outcome for the situation at hand, she shouldn't be a nurse.
Post by redheadbaker on Dec 28, 2013 15:49:59 GMT -5
I wonder if they had other problems with her. It says in another article that the company has made exemptions for others in the past, and that she did apply for one, too, but was denied.
Of course, they'll never say, so it's purely speculation.
Post by polarbearfans on Dec 28, 2013 17:15:01 GMT -5
I'm surprised at how many health care people seem to dislike the flu shot. 5 of the people I talked to for various appointments I had, and my being forced into the flu shot this year, seemed to not want the flu shot or seem to my think it is effective as we would hope. I'm not anti-flu shot, just have never participated. This year medication I am on compromises my immune system so it is not optional.
I can see why hospitals/health care are pushing it this year. It is more about protecting the patients big picture.
I wonder if she part of the PA Dutch community... that would certainly play into her reasoning.
I agree with the hospital on this one though.
Can she be a nurse, though, if she was part of the PA Dutch?
Probably not if she was deeply in the community, but the amish have a deep influence in Lancaster and I wonder if she maybe held some of the same beliefs... possible I suppose.
What kind of patients was she caring for because although there might be some extraneous facts, I'm probably not going to have a problem with them firing her.
I think she is (well, was) a home-visit nurse, so she cares/cared for a full range of patients from newborns to elderly.
What kind of patients was she caring for because although there might be some extraneous facts, I'm probably not going to have a problem with them firing her.
I think she is (well, was) a home-visit nurse, so she cares/cared for a full range of patients from newborns to elderly.
And has a one on one relationship with patients while carrying germs from one germy, non-hospital grade environment to another. If I'm her former employer, I'm wondering what kind of woo she's telling her patients about the flu shot and other medically valid methods of disease containment and treatment.
Post by debatethis on Dec 28, 2013 18:05:58 GMT -5
While I'm sympathetic to her fears (since miscarriages make subsequent pregnancies pretty scary at times), I can't support her fears outweighing solid research and CDC recommendations. Unvaccinated, she's a liability to herself, her unborn baby, her company, and all the people she cares for.
You'd be surprised. I've net anti vaxxers and people who believe in homeopathy and vitamins.
Yeah, my mother is a nurse (35 years in several different areas of nursing and is actually a nurse educator now) and pitched a royal hissy fit when I insisted that both she and my dad get their pertussis boosters prior to visiting our LO. She didn't want my 65 year old father to catch autism and since they eat healthy, she felt totally fine skipping it. And she also attempted to refuse the flu shot even though it's a requirement at her hospital, because it was "big government interfering with her body". There are days I really wish we weren't related.
Post by orangeblossom on Dec 28, 2013 19:10:41 GMT -5
Wearing a mask is an acceptable option, and many hospitals who allow declinations, offer up wearing a mask the whole flu season as an alternative.
It appears that this company doesn't allow for that, so they're within their right to do so.
Not only should healthcare workers (HCW) get the flu shot because it's best for them and their patients, but hospitals must now give their HCW flu rates to the government, and at some point, if not already, will be tied to payment, just as certain adverse events are.
HCWs should be vaccinated for the communicable diseases that they can be, especially the flu. Hell, you have to show proof of certain vaccines or immunity to certain diseases before you can even start school, so getting brand new about flu is ridiculous, IMO.
Breton said she isn't against the flu shot in general or other vaccines.
'I'm certainly not against it for everyone. The elderly and sick children, for people with weak immune systems, getting the flu can be a big deal. But for the healthy population, the flu is the flu and it's been around a long time,' she said.
'If other pregnant women want to get it that is fine as well but I don't want it for myself and I feel I have very valid questions. I would rather risk getting the flu than risk the unknowns of getting the flu vaccine.'
And who, exactly, do you think your patients are???
I'd like to see what information she's using to suppose she has a greater risk of miscarriage after getting the flu vaccine.
After all, I've seen and heard of plenty of people who died or were hospitalized for severe flu symptoms. I guess she's never heard of the flu pandemic. I can only imagine how much more severe flu symptoms can be for someone with a medical condition that only allows them some tylenol and cough drops.
I would love to see what my NP cousin and his nurse wife would say about this. They are extreme cons, but anti flu shot (which makes me want to shake them.). They don't like to put "unnecessary chemicals" in their bodies. They are MEDICAL PROFESSIONALS. There is NO excuse for their stupidity.
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — The group most threatened by swine flu and most in need of the new vaccine, world health authorities agree, is that of pregnant women.
For example, Aubrey Opdyke.
On June 27, Ms. Opdyke, a 27-year-old waitress and former high-school swimmer who weighed 135 pounds before her pregnancy and had no health risks other than a smoking habit, came down with mild flu symptoms.
She finally came home from the hospital three weeks ago.
“At first, I didn’t think anything of it — just another flu bug,” Ms. Opdyke said recently. “But it really wrecked me. I probably shouldn’t have made it.”
In the four months she was hospitalized, she spent five weeks in a coma, suffered six collapsed lungs and a near-fatal seizure. High-pressure ventilation blew her up like a molten balloon until “she looked like she weighed 400 pounds,” her husband, Bryan, said, and she has stretch marks from her neck to her ankles. Her muscles and lungs are still so weak that she uses a walker.
While hospitalized, she missed seeing her 4-year-old daughter, Hope, learn to swim and start pre-school.
And, most important, she lost her baby. Parker Christine Opdyke, almost 27 weeks in the womb, was delivered by emergency Caesarean section on July 18, when her fetal heart rate plummeted during Ms. Opdyke’s third lung collapse. Her airways were too blocked to let a breathing tube in, possibly a side effect of the drugs saving her mother. She lived seven minutes.
On Oct. 1, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said 100 pregnant women had been in intensive care with swine flu and 28 had died. That is a tiny fraction of what are believed to have been millions of cases in the country. But it is the best argument, federal officials say, for the drawn-out, expensive effort to make a swine flu vaccine.
Pregnant women are particularly susceptible because they are in the younger age group most likely to catch this new virus, while those over 50 who have had more flus rarely catch it. Moreover, pregnancy suppresses the immune system to protect the fetus, and the growing baby makes it harder for a mother to clear her lungs.
All but a few of the pregnant women who have died or been near death from swine flu are unknown. Privacy laws prevent health departments from releasing their names, and few families come forward.
The Opdykes did because “we wanted to get it out there how dangerous it can be,” Ms. Opdyke said.
“We have friends who get flu symptoms and say, ‘Oh, I’m not going to a doctor,’ ” Mr. Opdyke added. “And we say, ‘Do you not understand what we went through?’ I can’t imagine why there’s so much nonchalance.”
That nonchalance strikes close to home.
As they said this, Ms. Opdyke was doing her daily physical therapy, struggling to lift one-pound weights. Her therapist interrupted to announce that she opposed flu shots.
“Have you ever read the labels?” she asked. “They’re so full of toxins.”
Asked if she realized that a shot, had it existed in June, might have saved her client and her baby, she frowned and went back to her clipboard.
Unlike some other families that came forward, the Opdykes are not threatening to sue anyone.
They do not blame her obstetrician, even though she suggested acetaminophen the first time Ms. Opdyke called her and prescribed an antibiotic the second.
“Swine flu just wasn’t on our minds at all,” Ms. Opdyke said.
Nor are they angry at the Wellington Regional Medical Center. “I don’t think if I’d taken her anywhere else, she would have survived,” Mr. Opdyke said.
Her flu came on gradually, and she never had a high fever. But after a week of feeling exhausted and achy, she became delirious. When Mr. Opdyke drove her to the hospital, with his finger on the door-lock button for fear she would jump out, she could not tell the triage nurse her name.
Her blood oxygen level was below 70; normal is 95, and below 80 is life-threatening. Both lungs were full of fluid.
Thrashing, she knocked off oxygen masks and pulled out an intubation tube. Panic made her hyperventilate. Doctors finally sedated her into a paralytic coma to let the ventilator work.
She survived near-failure of her kidneys, then her lungs, damaged by continuous high-pressure oxygen, began collapsing. Mr. Opdyke was warned he might have to choose — her life or that of the baby, who was just at the border of survivability outside the womb.
“I said, ‘Save Aubrey,’ ” he said of the woman he married last year. “I can make another baby, but I can’t replace her.”
Her third lung collapse forced the issue. Parker had to be delivered, but she did not survive.
Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, a photographers’ charity for families of premature infants, offered to take black-and-white pictures. Ms. Opdyke’s mother bathed Parker and brushed her hair.
“Some people don’t agree,” Mr. Opdyke said about having the photographs taken. “But for me there was no option. Aubrey wasn’t awake, she didn’t get to bond. If I didn’t do it, there’s no way I could make it up to her.”
Aubrey Opdyke started to recover, then developed a bacterial infection common to ventilator patients. She nearly succumbed, then rallied and doctors started to wean her off the coma-inducing drugs. She had weeks of hallucinations about a friendly white dog visiting her but could not ask about it because of the tube.
Mr. Opdyke took comfort from what he saw as divine signs. Dog is “God” backwards, he noted. And one day, in a panic because he had forgotten to wear his wife’s wedding ring around his neck, he saw a license plate reading “FAITH.”
Ms. Opdyke’s last crisis was a still-unexplained seizure during a family visit. Her mother had been painting her nails and blamed herself, thinking the fumes had done it.
Now that she is home, in the townhouse complex they rent near the West Palm Beach airport, Ms. Opdyke is struggling to regain her strength. Muscles atrophy into rubber bands; every day in a coma means two days’ recovery.
She apologizes for the messy yard; she would pick it up but barely has the strength to get upstairs to bed. Mr. Opdyke has gone back part-time to his job at UPS.
Mr. Opdyke worries he gave her the flu. “I was sick two weeks before,” he said. “I touch packages that have been touched a thousand times. If anybody’s going to catch it, it’s me.”
He said he had not yet looked at the bills. His insurance covered most, he said, “but it had to be over a million, and we owe 20 percent; I’m not ready for that many commas.”
Friends from their jobs and a Girl Scout charity that Ms. Opdyke once ran with her mother have raised over $10,000 by holding benefits, and small checks have come in after articles by local journalists. “It’s a lot of help,” Ms. Opdyke said. “It really shows the compassion of people.”
And does she want another baby?
“Yes,” she says firmly. “At first, I didn’t. Now I do. But I’ve got to get my strength back.”
Unnecessary chemicals? Please tell me she doesn't dye her hair.
Oh, yes. They're basically hoarders as well, which is a fun story for another time. As is the story of their demon child. I'll post it sometime when I have time to check back and delete as necessary.
They were the ones on FB that said I got my flu shot too early. I didn't realize at the time that "too early," was code for "oh noes!!! Ingreeeeeedients!"
Most hospitals that allow exemptions from mandatory flu shots only allow them for religious reasons or medical reasons supported by a physician. Those who qualify for an exemption are then asked to wear masks during flu season.
The thing about masks is compliance. If she is a home health nurse no one but the patient knows if she is wearing her mask, and they will not know she is required to. So her employer hasmultiple reasons to question her judgement and putting the care of the patient first.
My employee health office wouldn't give one to me until I brought a note in from my doctor saying it was ok. I was surprised I had to jump through hoops since it is clearly recommended for pregnant women and I work in a hospital.