Complaint History & Business Rating for Maine Medical Center

S F. says: My 9 year old daughter has been suffering from chronic constipation since infancy. She’s had to sporadically wear diapers since kindergarten for random incontintence. For the past 3 months she’s had to wear adult diapers every night and for the past month she’s had to wear them all day every day due to severe, worsening incontinence and rectal bleeding. We saw her PCP and the doctor only followed up with an appointment for anxiety, completely disregarding her urgent physical symptoms.

Yesterday, 5/22/22, my daughter started leaking stool to the point of it soaking through her adult diaper and pants. She could barely walk, stating that her thighs were numb, and it looked like blood dripping down her legs. We went to MMC ED to check to see if it was actually blood with the idea that they would take images or ultrasounds or something to figure out why it’s gotten so severe so quickly and if there was a blockage. While at the ED the doctor received her entire history of the issue and told me that “this thing is very common in people and it’s most likely from anxiety.” Everytime I’ve gone to MMC for anything they always say the issue stemmed from anxiety, so I became a little annoyed and reminded the doctor that this issue has been happening since she was born and there is clearly a GI issue here and the fact that she no longer has any underwear and has to sit in her own poop on a daily basis would be the cause of anxiety if there was any. After doing a visual examination and running no tests or imagining, the doctor (Dr. Brigg(?) decided that she would manually remove the bowels after starting my daughter on a ketamine drip as soon as a room became available.

I found that starting a child on a ketamine drip for a manual procedure was a bit drastic but the doctor insisted, so we waited. Before this conversation my daughter had asked the doctor for a fresh, adult diaper because the one that children’s ED nurse gave her was fit for a toddler and was soaked in blood/feces.

The doctor never came back with a diaper for her and after a couple hours of her sitting in her own liquid stool, I decided to advocate for her and told the man at the nurses station that she can’t sit like that in her own poop for any longer and that she needs to be washed off. The nurse said that they will clean her up after the procedure and I said who knows how long it would take for a room to open up, so she couldn’t afford to sit in her stool any longer as her rectal area was bleeding and raw from irritation of having to sit on blankets that were soaked in fecal matter. I came out and asked a different person at the nurses station for her to be cleaned up and given more blankets and an adult diaper. The woman got visually annoyed with me and as she handed me some rags and two more toddler sized diapers, she said “if you aren’t able to clean her off then I’ll do it after I’m done out here.”

I took the rags and used the room’s sink and soap to clean up the poop but it was everywhere. I cleaned up my daughter but the entire time I knew that it was in no way sanitary. Poop was on the floor, on our clothes which got on the waiting room furniture and all over the room we moved to after that. My daughter used the child’s waiting room bathroom twice and I tried to clean up as much poop as I could, but i wasnt able to fully sanitize anything and as far as I know the staff never cleaned up where my daughter had been sitting or that waiting room bathroom. Before we arrived the waiting room bathroom was already disgusting and out of paper towels, and after we left it still had no paper towels and the only cleaning that was done was when I attempted to remove the poop myself with pieces of toilet paper. Who knows how many people were exposed to that toilet seat after that.

So after being told my daughter’s chronic physical issues were “caused by anxiety”, and told that she was going to be given sedatives via IV for a procedure when no imaging was done, and after the doctor ignored her request for a fresh, appropriately sized diaper, and the nurse being condescending towards me just for attempting to sanitize the area end prevent fecal matter from spreading to other patients(which is their job) we left. It doesn’t matter how short staffed a place is, if the doctor/staff is willing to let a child sit in their own poop and allow chances for infection or illness to spread simply because they choose not to clean up the waiting room surfaces and floors, then that staff is not qualified to work in a healthcare setting and ultimately don’t care about their patient’s body, hygiene or quality of care.

There’s absolutely no excuse for any of this. Something tells me that bathroom most likely wasn’t sanitized even after we left. Everytime we come to MMC ED we have to get a second opinion. Perhaps the doctors should be educated in hygiene and bedside manners instead of being told to diagnose anxiety as the cause of every ailment they come across. The doctors and ED department are the ones who cause the anxiety by gaslighting patients, minimizing and ignoring their chronic, physical conditions with no regard for preventative health and the inability to differentiate physical conditions with mental health illnesses.