My South Baldwin Regional Medical Center experience where, aside from the triage nurse, no one ever asked about a head injury and we never saw a doctor.
We wound up yesterday in the emergency room of a small regional hospital. When you can calmly walk yourself in, you think “This will do.”
A kind volunteer points me to the paperwork. The Yankee has to fill it out. In two or three minutes the triage nurse calls me back. Pulse, blood pressure, temperature. I tell him what happened, complain about my pain. He asks if my neck hurts. It does not. He asks me if I hit my head. Yes, I brought my helmet. He asks me if there are any cognition problems? I tell him no. He asks if I want to go to X-ray or wait for the doctor to order it. This decision is apparently up to me, so why wait? Let’s do the X-ray.
Someone from radiology quickly comes along, plops me in a wheelchair and rolls me back to X-ray for two quick shots. I prepare my best Yogi Berra joke. “They did a brain scan. It came back negative.”
I go back to the waiting room.
Soon a room opens up. My guess is that the above has all taken place in 30 minutes, give or take. The Yankee and I go back to the examination room, leaving our lovely friends Brian and Mrs. Brown to sit in the waiting room. We tried to get them to stay at the condo, but you know how concerned, caring people are.
And now the real waiting begins.
A nurse comes and leaves. The administration lady comes. No, I do not have a last rites preference. And I appreciate the protocol, but that’s not happening in here today, thanks.
Later another nurse comes in with a syringe of morphine. She wants to shoot it in my hip, but she can’t find my hip.
She can’t find my hip.
This … nurse … who somehow was trusted with a needle … can’t find my hip.
I was ready to give myself the shot.
A physician’s assistant comes in later to tell us about the X-ray. I have broken my collar bone. She’s waiting to hear from an orthopedic surgeon. Not too long after this I pop a sweat. I get the dizzy, dry-mouth sensation. A passing staffer kindly helps move me from sitting on the edge of the bed to reclining in the bed. I’m in too much pain to do it myself.
The simple act of lying in a bed when you have a broken collarbone is just about impossible, by the way.
The morphine, which the nurse said would provide some relief in 30 minutes, didn’t do anything. And has done a lot of nothing for an hour or so. I suspect that either my metabolism is super-charged or she pumped me full of saline.
I sit up, but soon take another turn to that sweaty, nauseated sensation. Back on the bed I go. I’m on my right side because lying flat is unbearable. Someone comes along and stuffs a pillow behind my back for support. This was, in point of fact, the best thing since sliced bread.
The physician’s assistant eventually returns and apologizes about the no-show ortho. He’s operating. Well, that’s understandable. She said, though, that they pulled him out of a surgery to glance at my film. He suggested we get an orthopedic consult at home this week. After a while we saw the X-ray ourselves.
The nurse who doesn’t know where hips are later brings a shot of dilaudid for the other hip. This painkiller, she predicts, will make me loopy. (It did not, but it did leave me tired, and occasionally left me at a loss for words.)
That same nurse then disappears to fetch something called an immobilizer. Over the long period of her absence we decided that the basement of this hospital is as hard to find as my hip. We’d later come to learn that my discharge papers were equally difficult to find.
After a while the nurse returns and struggles with the immobilizer for a period of time beyond comical bemusement in front of us before finally asking for help on how to use it. The immobilizer is a large elastic band that wraps around the torso. There is a cuff to keep your bicep close to your side. Another cuff keeps your wrist secured to your ribs. The idea is to keep your shoulder in one place. (This is challenging medical technology. There are three strips of velcro on it.)
After five hours — Five hours! — we were given a small prescription and my discharge papers. To my recollection no one ever looked at my road rash. There’s a mildly impressive case on my shoulder and arm. There’s a little more on my hip, knee and leg. Good thing we’d cleaned it up before going to the hospital.
Aside from the cursory triage question no one ever, ever, asked about my head. Ever. The farther away from the hospital I get, the more appalling that becomes.
We never saw a doctor.
On the wall in the exam room there was a note about the hospital’s goal was that we’d recommend them for emergency care needs. That’s a tough sell.
This deserves mention: everyone was courteous.
