In July 2006, following several years of periodic hospitalizations and the cancer's spread, postsurgical complications led to the removal of Ebert's lower jaw.
Toxic shock syndrome has been linked to a broad range of causes in men, women, and children, including skin wounds and postsurgical infections.
Even the program of exercises he did for his postsurgical wrist seemed a little detached, four times a day, an odd set of extensions and flexions that resembled prayer in some remote northern province, among a repressed people, with periodic applications of ice.
Painkillers given to fetuses would prevent postsurgical pain if it exists, but the known scientific reason for them is "it promotes healing," he said.
Although it is still unknown why chondrolysis develops, several medical studies have concluded that a likely culprit is a pain pump, a postsurgical medical device used to deliver local anesthetics to a specific area through a plastic tube.
Each afternoon, along with shopping and acceding to my pleas for more scrambled eggs for dinner (not hearty enough for postsurgical healing, in Agnes's view), we talked.
Its volunteers — about five dozen therapists, nurses, technicians and community workers — have been providing postsurgical care and physical therapy at 12 hospitals here, and the organization is setting up a prosthetics workshop, too.
Disproportionately affecting older people, a rapidly growing share of patients, hospital delirium affects about one-third of patients over 70, and a greater percentage of intensive-care or postsurgical patients, the American Geriatrics Society estimates.
After a series of postsurgical complications, the final blow was a bloodstream infection that sent him into shock and resisted treatment with antibiotics.
The rate of postsurgical complications also increased with age, to 22 percent for patients in their late 80s and early 90s, from 14.6 percent for those in their late 60s.
A system that promotes the practice of allowing a poorly supervised and inexperienced first-year resident to assume responsibility for the care of 34 patients is the recipe for the "woefully inadequate postsurgical care" discovered by the state Health Department.
