A Visit to the ER

A Visit to the Emergency Room

Stabbing pains in my right hip woke me up that Monday morning. I couldn’t stand or walk. I’ve had some pain there before caused by my autoimmune problems and some weird condition called undifferentiated spondyloarthropathy. But the pain I had this morning was 100 times worse. I knew I had to go to the emergency room.

My wife Linda helped me up and got my shoes on. It was too painful to change out of my pajamas, so I left them on, and then she helped me to our car. Every step was painful. At one point, I thought I would pass out from the pain.

I’ve been to ERs before, but this one was the worst. As they wheeled me in in a wheelchair, I saw a woman at the counter weeping. She was saying she had waited too long, that she was in too much pain, that she couldn’t wait any longer for a doctor. The receptionist tried to quiet her, but she couldn’t stop pleading and weeping. Finally, a security guard came and took her away.

But that wasn’t the end of it. Across the aisle from us, a boy sat shaking and groaning. A few feet from him, a woman kept vomiting into a pink dishpan.

Linda and I sat there for 3 hours. Finally we got moved inside, out of the waiting area. Inside, it was worse.

Because the emergency area is so small, we sat in a narrow hallway for another hour. We heard nurses and doctors talking to people about their heart attacks, their drug overdoses, their insurance policies and why they wouldn’t cover anything. In the room across from us, a little girl screamed over and over.

Finally, I saw a doctor. He ordered blood tests and CT scans for me. He hoped they would explain the stabbing pain in my hip. They didn’t. After 5 hours of waiting for the results, we were told I didn’t have cancer, broken bones, or a kidney failure, but the tests didn’t explain my stabbing pain.

I said to the doctor, “What can I do?” He told me to make an appointment to see my doctor. When I said it would take weeks, he shrugged. I asked him if he could give me something for the pain, and he suggested oxycodone. I said I’ve had it before, and it didn’t work for my pain. He nodded and said it didn’t work for his pain either. He said he’d write a prescription for something else that might help.

When I left the ER, I understood why the woman was screaming when I first came in. I wanted to start screaming too. After 8 hours in the ER, I was going home. The stabbing pain was less stabbing. Sitting around for those 8 hours must have helped.

Watching TV shows about doctors, you start believing they can fix all the medical problems in the world. But the reality is different. Sometimes doctors can fix problems, and sometimes they can’t. The last thing the ER doctor said to me was that about 40% of the patients he sees come because of some kind of terrible pain. And of that 40%, only about a fourth find their problems solved.

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This column recently appeared in the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish newspaper in America.  

https://dziennikzwiazkowy.com/felietony2/wizyta-na-szpitalnym-oddziale-ratunkowym/

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