The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center — Attraction in Columbus

Please be very careful when you or your family are admitted into OSU brain and spine, we really loved the care we got there for my dads first neck surgery, and they did great after his first part of his back surgery. But then we went to a different side of the unit after his part 2 surgery on Thursday April 10th 2025 and it was and still is awful. My dad developed hospital delirium and was progressively going downhill by the minutes (he typically gets hospital delirium but this time it was to the point where he almost needed restraints) a staff member left office scissors on his tray table and my mom walked in and found my dad swinging and playing with them, my mom had to take them to the nursing station. There were 5 occasions where his call light was never answered and 3 occasions where it took nurses over 3 minutes to respond to his bed alarm. OSU would not let my dad have a sitter present so one of us had to be with him the whole time because he attempted to pull out his drains and IVs. The first night I stayed he was on delirium precautions and his PCA came in at like 1am and turned on the brightest light and started to wake my dad up, I said “he is on delirium precautions so he not to bed disturbed right now can you please turn the light off” she continued to argue with me about getting his blood and vitals, at this point he is wide awake and she then says oh I’m sorry and starts to leave” I said “he is already awake, you need to do cluster care so please go ahead and take his blood and vitals, she then says “no no I don’t want to disturb him” I said “do I need to get his nurse? Please just do what you need to so he can rest.” I start to walk to the door and say I’ll ask the nurse what to do” She then hurries and speed walks to the nurses station, I explained the situation and the nurse looks at his PCA and says his vitals are every 8 hours, he isn’t due for vitals and you need to go ahead and get the labs while he is awake and then we need to leave him be for a while”. Then the nurse apologized to me. Also, When I walked in yesterday my dad was down on the floor behind a hospital bed hiding from “2 men trying to steal” his money. I told my mom to call for the nurse. No one came and me and my cousin were trying to get him up but it would’ve caused injury to his back incision, several minutes later I told my mom to activate the bed alarm and make it go off, it took them over 3 minutes to respond to the bed alarm (2 nurses were out in the hallway). Later in the evening last night my dad was getting more confused and kept wandering around. I kept telling the staff that he is starting to go stir crazy in the room and does better when we go for walks and they said he had to walk with a nurse but there was only 1 time a nurse took him for a walk, so he kept getting worse. My dad has to have 3/4 bed rails up and it has to be the top 2 and bottom one because he can crawl out of the bed if one of the top rails is put down. So he wandered out in the hall with my mom and 2 nurses brought him back and then the charge nurse came in. He told them to put one top side rail down so I said “he will crawl out that way” charge nurse says “we want him to use his call light and ask for help” i said “I understand but he won’t use the call light, he will get out of bed” he then says “that’s why we had the bed alarm” I said “okay but we set the bed alarm off and no one came for over 3 minutes” he then says “when?” And gave me a look like I was lying and I said “earlier today” and then my mom chimed in and said “it did happen earlier today” and the charge nurse suddenly realized he was wrong and was not happy about it so he says “uhm okay it’s after visiting hours so are you leaving?” And I said “yes, but I’m not leaving until I know he’s safe, I’m not trying to be rude I’m just stating no one came to help earlier and on more than one occasion” he says “but you are being rude, will you leave now?” I then said “will you keep my dad off the floor?” I then asked his name and told him I would be reporting it. He said...

An overall TERRIBLE experience. My wife was improperly diagnosed with lower abdominal pain a few years back; I say "improperly" because she's had several laparoscopies and hysteroscopies over the past three years to treat endometriosis, believed to be the main cause of this pain, and has had the same symptoms return less than a month after each surgery (they even took out her gall bladder and appendix during separate surgeries, just to make sure to get it all). Unless she has a mutant strain of fast growing uterine tissue, that's not normal. She even went to an endo specialist, and he couldn't help her.

So we decided to try a hospital that's out of our usual network, to see if maybe they could find something different. They couldn't, and so the end result was the same as it always is: a discharge with prescriptions for pain and nausea meds, but nothing that will actually prevent this from happening again.

However, that's not what was so upsetting about this trip. Quite simply, this place appears to be a disorganized mess. To their credit, we got in within minutes of checking in. We got a room shortly thereafter, where they got her into a hospital gown, ran a pelvic exam, and told her they'd be running two more. After about two hours, and keep in mind she's shivering, whimpering, and hunched over from being in so much pain, they finally give her morphine for pain. Must have been a very low dose, because she was back in pain within twenty minutes of telling me she felt it kick in.

We were then removed from our room, and put in a little waiting room, where we stayed for the remaining 6 hours of our visit. I have never seen a hospital where you are not given a room for the duration of your stay, especially when they are planning on running several tests. Anyway, we were told on a couple different occasions that they would get her additional pain medication since she was still in obvious pain, the most recent time from a doctor who ran down what tests they were going to run. We waited an hour and a half. They came to get her for her next test, an ultrasound, and still without any pain meds. By now it had grown so bad that she passed out.

Even after she woke up, still crying and in obvious distress, they didn't put her in a room, instead placing her on a bed in the middle of a hallway, where she still had to wait about a half an hour for any pain meds to come. When they finally came, they took her to the ultrasound (which took about 45 minutes), then a shortwhile later, to have a CT scan. At this point, they finally took her pain seriously, scheduling her for pain meds every two hours, but they were still ridiculously late to administer her next dose, to the point that we had to ask.

Everything feels disorganized and rushed: Several times while we were in the waiting room, doctors would go to grab the wrong person. At one point, a doctor thought I was the one that needed help as he approached me and said, "Mr. [insert male last name here]?" Another time they called out the name of someone that had never been in that waiting room. It felt like this place was made up of college kids trying to earn their degrees, not fully licensed doctors running a legitimate place of business.

There was one doctor, and only one, that was very compassionate; were it not for him, I think they would have just let her keep passing out from pain. I'm pissed because I read his name badge, but at some point over the next five frustrating hours, forgot, which makes me feel as bad as half these doctors should feel for neglecting my wife proper care. I think his initials were "SS", but I might be way off. Anyway, he was the only one that showed any sort of emotion, and basically made sure that she was taken care of and would constantly check in on her to make sure she was okay, even though he wasn't even assigned to take care of her. He should go to a different hospital, because he's far too good for this one.

Bottom line: Go...

Every single part of our experience in this hospital was awful.

My husband who had a previous heart condition went into the ER with chest pain, after waiting 6 1/2 hours to be seen, I asked when we would get to see a doctor because we had been waiting a very long time, and MULTIPLE people who came hours after us, had come and gone. We were told that they see people based on priority of their symptoms... I’m sorry, chest pain with a previous condition isn’t a priority to this hospital!? Then once we were checked into a room and actually seen by a doctor, they realized something was seriously going on with him, and admitted him. We met with a team of doctors that morning, the attending was rude from the start, and seemed like he had better things to do than care for my husband. My husband has myocarditis and pericarditis, which are both very serious and myocarditis can be life threatening. They ran a number of tests on him and gave us very few answers on what was going on with him, and as we are looking through my husband my chart the number of test they ran compared to the information that was shared with us should be an embarrassment to the hospital. We weren’t even advised of 1/3 of the tests they ran on him, and the ones we did know, we had to ask several times for the results, and everyone acted like us wanting to be informed about what the heck was going on was an inconvenience. We asked several times for them to share more about his condition and got different answers from the doctors and the student doctors. We had one student doctor tell us that he couldn’t take ibuprofen, aspirin, or Tylenol, which scared us since they had just given him Tylenol for his headache, then later had another student doctor tell us it was fine.We arrived on Tuesday night and were discharged on Friday morning, however every time we asked how long they thought we would be staying, because we both work and needed some kind of update for our jobs, they said he’ll be discharged either tonight or tomorrow morning. We didn’t know we were leaving until about two hours before they discharged him. They gave him 4 different medicines to take for the next 3-6 months, and told him he could return back to work. 3, let me say that again THREE of the 4 medicines state very clearly that you can’t drive while taking this, he’s a roofing salesman who DRIVES from house to house and sells roofs... we explained this to them clearly and they said, he’s fine to go back to work and take these. The pharmacist when we picked these up made it very clear he couldn’t drive while on all of these meds. When we would meet with the doctors in the morning, every question we had they acted like we were ignorant for asking, then one of the student doctors printed off an article that we had already read on google from the Mayo Clinic and said here, hopefully this will answer your questions. On top of all of this, all but one nurse we had was rude and acted inconvenienced by pretty much everything. One of the nurses, we hardly saw all night, her student nurse did pretty much everything but hand out his medicines.

After leaving the hospital we contacted the myocarditis foundation founder from the Mayo Clinic and they were shocked at the fact that they told him to go back to work (and let us know he can’t take his medicines and drive). She suggested that we go to the Cleveland Clinic for a second opinion, because this condition is serious and can be life threatening.

My husband had someone stop by his room and ask him about how his experience at the hospital was so far, and he felt like he couldn’t share because his doctor already showed such little care that if he said something, he was nervous that he was going to get even worse care... I thought taking my husband here was a good decision, but I was...