thank you all for your kind words of support. It really does go a long way.
I want to get your opinion on a course of action, if any. Here are the details of my father-in-law's stay at the hospital. He went in on July 30th for a routine operation to remove some polyps from his intestine (he technically had colon cancer). The surgery went well, and he started his recovery. About a week after, they discovered he had an abcess in his intestine, which was slowing his recovery, so in he went for surgery again. Recovering from that, he kept complaining that he was in pain, but the nurses were dismissing it as "normal". After a week of that, the resident surgeon on staff came to see him. Took one look at him and said that it wasn't "normal" at all and needed emergency surgery to close up a hole left behind. The worst part of all of this was that the nurses told us he wasn't making sense because he had DEMENTIA!!!
It wasn't dementia, it was him going insane with pain!!! So after his emergency surgery, they moved him to ICU, where his recovery was hit-and-miss for a week. At the beginning of this week, we were all thinking he was going to pull through, because his vitals were looking better and he was responding. Tuesday night rolls around and everything just falls apart. Come Wednesday afternoon, we've lost him...
Needless to say, the whole family is just peeved beyond words that the nurses dismissed him so quickly. His room-mate in recovery had actually had the same thing happen to him (with the same doctor), except that he'd been sent home and his stomach exploded...