Emergency Room = JOKE

As some of you know, I broke my leg about three weeks ago. And I'm not here to cry about my leg. I'm here to talk about how our hospital's Emergency Room is inadequate, and must be changed.

When I entered the ER, on the night of October 24th, it was around nine'o clock and I had just come from the ice rink where I had collided with a wall. The wall won. I waited in the waiting room for about twenty five minutes, and finally got help from the front desk attendant. She brought me straight into a room and took my vitals. You know, the usual. Anyway, I saw her for about five minutes. The parents showed up about fifteen minutes later and, by the looks of things, they looked tired. I told them what happened, and we waited. Somewhere around ten minutes later a nurse came in and I told him about what happened too. He said we had to wait for the radiologist and that it would be about ten minutes, and asked if I felt comfortable enough to move to the x-ray room, or if I needed 'something for the pain.' Yea, well, let's just say that we waited to take the x-rays. In fact, they came to the room to take them, which was pretty cool. The radiologist was pretty cool. He plays the drums at Squires Bar on Wednesdays. We shot the shit, and he took the x-rays. Everything seemed to be going pretty well. That is, until the radiologist left. My parents and I waited for the next step in the process of getting the hell out of there. I mean, we really waited. It must have been around 45 minutes before we saw anybody else. Well, we saw nurses and doctor's, but they were stationed behind a glass wall. And I was on the other side, like an animal in a cage to be put on show for everyone to see. Finally, a doctor showed up. This is the first time I actually talked to a doctor, mind you. I mean, it was pretty busy that night, but what the hell? He came in, and told me that he looked at the x-rays and gave me what I expected, the bad news. The tibia and fibula had broken and there looked to be some ligament damage. Surgery was a likely scenario, but he couldn't be sure until I talked to an orthopedic doctor (Good thing too, because it turns out I only broke my fibula and not my tibia.). The ligament damage was still there though. Oh yea, and he wanted to take some more x-rays, because he wanted to see the bones from a different view. So, this took somewhere between 45 minutes and an hour to accomplish. And I'm just talking about getting the x-rays done. It was probably a half hour after that until we saw the doctor again. The windowed room across from where I was showed me everything I needed. The doctor was at a computer, and all the nurses and other doctors just sat there while I waited. While my family and I watched them talk amongst themselves and not pay any attention to us. It was ridiculous, we had to grab somebody who was walking by to see what was taking so long. The lady we grabbed went in and talked to the doctor for about twenty seconds and he came right out. The only thing I got from this was that he was wasting our time, that he could have helped us earlier. I hate the ER. It's supposed to be an EMERGENCY ROOM, not a damn waiting room. When he finally came back, I was told we were going to put the foot into a cast for a week until I could see an orthopedic doctor. Then he left again. A female nurse came right after and tried to give me an IV so I could get some pain killers in me, but she missed the veins, twice. She had to get the first nurse I had seen to do it. He got it the first time, and pumped me full of something. It was cold to the touch, and was supposed to make me delirious and not feel anything. Well, I felt a little weird, but besides that, the pain did not go away (I think I'm predispositioned to pain killers for some reason, because when I got surgery nothing was working then either. The doctors kept asking me, "You can really feel that?" It started to freak me out because they also said, "You shouldn't be able to feel that." And when they tried to put me under for surgery, it took longer than was supposed to, to put me to sleep. The anesthesiologist was like, "Breath in, I need you to breath in." My response was, "I am breathing in, see?" And after that he said, "Alright, give me a second." I don't know what he did, but the next thing I remember was waking up. Finally, something had worked.). About twenty minutes went by, and then the doctor showed back up with the male nurse. He told me to lift my leg as much as I could. I did, and the nurse held it. The doctor told me that what happened next was gonna hurt. He never told me what he was going to do, and I automatically thought I had dislocated something. He put my foot against his chest and told me that we had to straighten the foot. O shit, I thought, this IS going to hurt. He grabbed my leg and pulled it towards him until my leg was in the traditional L shape. Man, I wish the medicine would have worked better. It fucking hurt. Anyhow, by the time we got out of there it was about 3:30am. I had been there almost six hours. I was tired, angry, and in pain. 

The reason I'm sharing this with you is because our Emergency Room is a joke. They make people wait for extended periods of time, and ride out the stay of their patients. I would like to think of an ER as a place where people go to get immediate service for whatever is ailing them. But all I think about now is how I never want to go back there (not that I ever wanted to go back). It is a place of wasted time, and wasted money. You see an actual doctor for about five to fifteen minutes the whole time you're there, and you spend hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in the process. A part of me thinks they keep you there so they can make more money. If nobody ever says anything, then it's going to be like this forever. And that just doesn't go well with me.