So... I have these six characters who have been in a coma for the last two weeks (same incident) and now I'm wondering how long they'll be in the hospital now that they're awake. The incident is basically a comet (maybe meteorite is a better term?) hits the ground almost right on top of them. There's also the added 'benefit' of the space rock containing a radiation previously unknown to mankind. Think Monsters vs Aliens style but that's the only part that's similar - no one grows, they just get abilities that are semi-easy to hide. Mind you, these six are between 12 and 14 so that might have a say in the length. Also, one of the kid's parents work at the hospital and I have no idea if that would also affect the time, though I kinda doubt it would.
You may need to specify a country. And while I assume that it's not legal in the US to kick people out of the hospital early for no/bad insurance (?), I also wouldn't be too surprised if edge cases get booted out earlier based on coverage.
Not illegal in the US to kick people out of the hospital early for no/bad insurance, unless there was a provision in Obamacare that changed it. I have a sister who worked in healthcare who saw a lot of stuff go down at a prominent hospital. She left the healthcare industry due to burnout right before Obamacare passed, but pre-Obamacare, in the US a hospital only had to stabilize you to try to prevent you from dying. After stabilizing the patient, they were under no legal obligation to continue treating the patient. That whole thing about going to the ER to get treated for an illness if you had no insurance? Total fallacy, unless the hospital chose to. Hers was a private hospital whose protocol was to immediately either hustle you out to County or release you. They also didn't provide followup care. Google "patient dumping" and see what you get.
They all probably have good insurance. What my question is is how long someone would stay in the hospital after awakening from a two week coma. I did look up patient dumping, though. Definitely not good...
This again is where you kind of get to do what you want. I would say right off the top of my head two weeks for follow up tests and evals but make sure to include after the fact constant reoccuring appointments to further monitor health. That sounds real enough to me and if not I fall back on a question that hasn't let me down. Does (insert what ever event drove the question for the underline) the length of their stay impact the arc of the story? If it does, do more research and make it as real as you need to. If not then who cares and move forward to whatever ends serve your work.
Thank you, Ninja. I had been thinking along the same lines for length but I'd worried that it would be too long. Now I know that it's not. Thanks for helping me double-check the time.
Googling length of hospital stay after coma and recovery after coma, it really depends on how long the person was out, and what actually caused the coma. So, extraordinary cause of a coma= make up something extraordinary. Written 1960's soap opera style it would be something like, "Doctor, it's so strange...We've never seen this before: All the victims had this strange phenomenon: they all woke up exactly 75.5 hours later." You get the gist. The something extraordinary could be executed much more realistically than what I've written here.
I would assume that depends on their injuries. Do you know what their injuries are? (broken bones, bleeding brain, collapsed lung, etc...) If you know those, you could probably google how long people typically stay in the hospital for those injuries. One thing, though, is I don't know how much of those types of injuries would be fixed in the time they were in the coma. If you want it to affect the time, how about having that parent make sure that their kid is getting around the clock attention or something. Maybe they try a new medicine or procedure on him/her? Probably wouldn't work if the kid's parent was just a nurse, but if the parent is the lead cardiologist, then they might be able to pull it off.
Nope, if they don't want you there, they'll show you the street. There was a news story just last week about a Baltimore hospital that put a half naked woman out to the street in nothing but a hospital gown on a freezing night. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2018/01/10/video-shows-apparently-incapacitated-half-naked-woman-put-out-in-cold-by-baltimore-hospital/?utm_term=.0eb71c22e73c
They don't really have many injuries except maybe bruises (the meteorite didn't land directly on them). As for hospital worker parents... one is a nurse the other is the top hematologist. Anyway, thanks for all this help. I'm setting it to be "about two weeks later" when they get home. Right, so... I just realized I forgot something. Just how strict is Doctor-Patient confidentiality? As in the real world. Here, in the USA. And then transferred to another universe in which six "teens" are exhibiting interesting occurrences... such as sky-blue, glowing blood (they only appear to glow when it's dark but it's there all of the time). Basically, what I'm asking is if a government like the USA gov might be told and then the patient taken away. Or would this not be the case with a private hospital? As probably seen by a lot of my threads on here... I'm kinda useless when it comes to medical know-how...
That would probably earn a call to the CDC or a similar entity. Anything ridiculously strange, possibly hazardous, infectious with very little known about it would probably also get them quarantined until the symptoms either passed or the patients were shown not to be a hazard to the general public.
Welp. There goes summer... and life... unless it appears later... And this is why you have to be careful with rewriting old stories...
If it makes you feel better, I'm writing this from a Canadian perspective, where insurance problems aren't really a thing. So if your characters didn't have great insurance, they may have gotten dumped after a couple of days? Long enough to recover, but not long enough for blood work to get back from the lab and cause a big deal?
They have good insurance and one of the kid's dad and mom work there... the dad's at the top... now I'm wondering how to pace it... and the part with the blood... I kinda wanna keep... *sighs*
You could always do it as a small backwoods town where doctors still make housecalls and care more for the patients than procedures. The kids are in no obvious danger and the general consensus is they'd be more comfortable in the care of their families. They know the kids and plan to visit them as they recuperate further at home.
They'd still be in a hospital for coma, right? In which case it would be a small town that isn't really given much attention? But not so small that there isn't a hospital? I wonder what my younger self was thinking when they started this...
If your community was geographically isolated, then you could have a small town with a relatively quiet hospital. If your towns main industry was tourism, then you could have quite a large hospital that would be practically empty and minimally staffed it the incident happened in the down season. It could also mean doctors being less willing to use facilities out of town due to long travel and processing time needed to send out blood samples and get them back and would probably rely on a smaller, more limited in hospital lab that would be less likely to pick up on certain things. I was also thinking that maybe the glowing blood could loose it's lustre after being removed from the body and it starts dying, like regular blood does, so the differences wouldn't be readily visually apparent to anyone that wasn't actually witnessing the blood being drawn in a darkened room.
Small towns usually don't get much attention, something like this would be sure to draw a circus. Another good reason to get the kids out; they go and the media mess goes with them.
