What’s wrong? What doesn’t belong?
When I was a child at school, we were presented with pictures, say of a nest, a ball, and a bird. What doesn’t go?
Am I a hypochondriac if I notice something ‘s not quite right with my body? Something’s wrong.
Maybe I’m not right about what’s wrong, but I’m not wrong that something doesn’t belong. In this case, hindsight is not all that helpful.
I’m pretty sure that I learned sometime along the line that I should trust my instincts. I should recognize signals and listen beyond the obvious.
It’s always on a weekend, usually a Sunday. Or, it’s late at night, when you can’t call your doctor’s office to get a last-minute appointment.
This wasn’t an accident. There was no blood gushing from any wound or orifice. I didn’t arrive with lights flashing or sirens blaring.
I was kind of sure by the time I arrived, all the symptoms would have disappeared. That’s how it goes. Even though I looked a bit worse for the wear, I didn’t look bad for going to Walmart late at night, or to the ER.
Almost everybody who has a need to visit an ER for yourself or to accompany a loved one, knows you’re in for a long wait the moment you step through the hospital’s automatic doors. The question is, will I feel a fool for having done this.
If I tend to blow something out of proportion, my husband has been known to say, “it’s not a crisis.” Well, I’m of the mind that “crisis” is relative to the beholder. Maybe it’s not a crisis to you, but it’s my body that’s not quite right.
However, whether something is a crisis, or ER-worthy, is best known only in hindsight. In other words, you never know.
This story is a composite of the experiences of several folks from whom I’ve heard or seen, regarding their ER sagas. So, the pronouns “I” and “me” are used not as personal pronouns but as an “anybody.”
I had been startled a couple of hours prior, with a sudden, toothache-like pain on the left side of my torso. Added to degenerative disc pain on my left lower back that had been troubling that week, it was scary but it subsided. I took a shower and chilled out in front of the television.
Then it happened again while I was laying on a heating pad on the sofa. It was so acute that I shot up to a seated position and hobbled to the bathroom. A wave of nausea hovered over me and I spit up salty clear liquid, and dry heaved for a few seconds. I took my temperature and it was a low-grade fever.
A couple of weeks prior, I had been experiencing some abdominal symptoms for which I had been prescribed a course of two antibiotics. I was unimaginable that another infection could have crossed that antibiotic barrier.
Could it be a “silent heart attack,” that women can experience as back pain and fatigue. I had been working for weeks on a cleaning project that required lifting, climbing stairs up and down dozens of times, and exertion beyond the usual daily walks that I take for my heart-health. Fatigue was a normal reaction, I thought. But, what if?
So many symptoms can be nothing or they can be something, either simple and routine, or sadly age-related typical, or they can be serious. How do you know?
One weighs, if it’s not absolutely acute, if you should just “ride it out.” Or, when it’s after doctor’s office hours, in these parts, you go to the ER, or you don’t. I did.
There were people in the waiting room but it was very quiet. I headed to the intake window and was handed a clipboard and asked to fill out a form. So off to the waiting room, and here we go.
Along with three or four other pairs of folks who were in varying degrees of misery, I waited to be seen. I coveted that little boy’s blanket, covering his head.
A woman came in and asked me quite publicly, with absolutely no gesture of privacy, for my name and date of birth. I would have objected to the blatant lack of patient confidentiality had I not felt so utterly out of sorts. But I obliged and she put a wristband on my pale, clammy arm. My husband then joined me in the club of people trying to be polite with one another but not really wanting to socialize.
At a rate of about one patient admitted through the double automatic doors to treatment rooms per half hour on what was a relatively silent week-night ER, we began to hear feel uncomfortable with the cell-phone over-sharing of our compatriots.
Not having additional acute pain since our arrival, I began questioning why we came. We took a walk and I visited the rest room and settled in another, more isolated waiting area.
Upon hearing another trope from some other people about intimate health conundrums, my less pained body and more alert mind, got irritated and I decided to go home. I was willing to risk that I had overreacted.
We went to the window and interrupted a nurse munching on party mix, talking with the intake woman. It felt like an intrusion on their evening plans. But I said, “I’m leaving.”
She took my name and declined to remove my wristband saying I could have it. It was public information anyway at this point.
Emergency care, this was not. This hospital emergency department seemed reminiscent of the television shows I’ve seen of underfunded, overworked NHS A&E departments in the U.K.; not what I expected from “our ER” in rural Pennsylvania.
Urgency to help hurting and or scared people was nowhere to be found. When people are more willing to leave and risk life and limb rather than wait for hours to be seen on what appeared to be a slow night in the department, something’s wrong.
It occurred to me that staff shouldn’t be seen to be snacking with their mates instead of attending to patients, it’s off-putting and unprofessional to say the least. This atmosphere announces that this hospital doesn’t care about patients.
I realize that this was not a trauma requiring the word, “stat.” And it probably wasn’t a crisis, with the operative word being “probably.” But you never know and I’m just saying, “what’s wrong with this picture?