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Alice in EmergencyRoomLand
by Rus Cooper-Dowda
I had the misfortune recently
of having to go to the emergency room for the first time in many years. I expected a somewhat controlled chaos. But I never realized just how bad the emergency-room experience has become.
The only reason I was in the emergency room was because my doctor's office did not have time to spend five minutes on the phone with me to answer a few very pressing questions. After waiting five hours without having my repeated calls returned, I was finally forced to go to the shiny, up-to-date "Fast Track" ER near my home.
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"You old chicken! You could have gotten off that bedpan by yourself if you had really wanted to!"
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I waited a very long time under the sign thanking me for my "understanding and patience." Finally, I was allowed into the triage area. I got less than four minutes to explain my very complex medical problem.
The first round of paperwork got filled out there. My new friend Audrey -- we'd met here in the emergency room -- watched and laughed from under the huge, bleeding bump on her forehead when I suggested that a medical staffer actually check my vital signs. She had been there seven hours and was still waiting for the same.
Triage decided I might be a candidate for surgery -- even without vital signs. They put me on a stretcher and rolled me over so that I was against the ice machine. As I am hard of hearing, the continual sound of ice falling was a challenge throughout my visit.
My treatment in the ER was becoming so strange by this point that I started taking notes for what you are reading now. All the patients around me thought this would get me faster, better care. We were wrong.
My biggest problem was that I was short of breath. I needed the end of my stretcher raised, so I could lie back and still breathe. I asked 14 times for this small act of kindness during the course of my stay in the ER. No one ever raised my stretcher for me.
An hour and 15 minutes had passed before the first ER staffer made eye contact with me. I had been admitted as an "emergency" -- but it still took over an hour and 15 minutes for anyone to ask me the first question: It was the clerk, asking if I had insurance -- and did I have my card with me?
The younger and more handsome the patient, the more courteous their treatment. The more the patient looked like the staff treating them, the better the care.
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I asked her to explain a complicated form. No dice. The only form I clearly understood began with, "I know I am suffering...." If I hadn't been suffering before I got here, I certainly was by now!
An hour and a half after my being declared an "emergency," a doctor finally came over to me. He did not touch me, tell me his name, check my breathing, listen to my chest or do an x-ray, but, on the basis of his "exam," I heard him on the phone telling my family doctor (the one who would never call me back) that, "After an extensive examination..."
His diagnosis was that I should contact my doctor who would not talk to me that morning in the first place! I should have known I was in trouble when I opened with, "My doctor sent me here" only to have him respond, "Did your doctor send you here?"
Three hours after I first reported shortness of breath, a nurse sauntered over. "Oh, so the Little Lady wants her oxygen level checked, does she?" Three and a half hours after reporting chest pain, I finally got someone else to put a stethoscope to my chest.
Things weren't any better for the others around me. Family members
were being expected to do an amazing amount of medical work with microseconds of training, from balancing their loved ones on bedpans to watching heart monitors.
When the monitor on one such patient sounded, everyone noticed -- except the medical staff. Finally the elderly wife started screaming, "For the love of God -- Will someone please come look to see if it's the machine or my unconscious husband who has gone off?"
An aide ran up. "Are you the family who keeps hollerin' about someone being left on a bedpan?"
THAT guy actually had no family to help him, and thus was left unaided to balance on a bedpan an hour and 20 minutes before getting dismounting assistance (I timed it because it was taking so long). The aides who finally came to help him off the bedpan started off by announcing, "You old chicken! You could have gotten off that by yourself if you had really wanted to!" This was not true by a long shot.
By then I had begun to recognize what I can only call the "George Clooney Sydrome:" The younger and more handsome the patient, the more courteous was their treatment. It also seemed the more the patient looked like the staff treating them, the better the care.
This meant that the more visibly disabled the patients were, the less well they were treated. Elderly women with obvious dementia were left unclothed in hallways. Younger, good looking women (whom the staff had already determined were less ill) got the rooms with the doors that closed.
Two women who used wheelchairs had them taken away and "stored." They then both ended up repeatedly watching ER staff use their privately owned and customized equipment to transport other patients. No one asked permission to do so.
Across from me, a technician was working on the medical equipment, carefully and lovingly scraping off their 3- year-old Y2K OK" stickers and replacing them with stickers saying exactly the same thing. He wasn't testing anything; he was just changing the stickers.
A nearby patient who'd come to the ER with a severe asthma attack insisted to all who would listen that the ammonia being used to clean those sticker spots was making her sicker. She asked to be moved. The staff responded by increasing her medication and threatening to tie her down due to her new "agitation." They ignored her pleas to be moved further away from the chemical.
I realized while watching this sanctioned inhumanity that I could easily die there, literally an inch from help.
After five hours in the emergency room, with 27 minutes of medical attention (costing over a thousand dollars),I was sent home.
My diagnosis? "You have to make your doctor talk to you." Yep. The same doctor who'd sent me to the ER rather than talk to me 10 hours earlier.
Rus Cooper-Dowda is a minister and freelance writer in St. Petersburg, Fla.
Posted June 9, 2001
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