Crowded Emergency Rooms Are Nothing New
News flash for all of those 24-year-old reporters writing hair-on-fire stories about over-crowded emergency rooms and Covid: Hospital emergency rooms have always been hellholes. Wait times have always been atrocious. In my experiences with various ERs, if you don’t arrive by ambulance, your chances of seeing a doctor in less than three hours are slim.
So stop using ERs to gin up the Covid panic.
Now it’s Covid.
I’m starting to think the problem may be with emergency care in America.
I found myself in the ER with my kids at least half a dozen times over the years. Each visit was excruciating and interminable.
Our most memorable emergency encounter happened eight years ago.
That was the July day I spent 14 awful hours in a Beach emergency room with my son who was suffering from severe abdominal pain.
He’d been sick the night before and I hoped he could tough it out until morning so he could see our family doc and not wind up in the ER.
One look at him and our family physician sent him to the hospital anyway. We arrived in the ER around 9 a.m.
My son finally got a bed at about 3 and saw a doctor - an arrogant and unsympathetic one - at about 6 p.m. Nine hours after we arrived.
Initially, I was simply stunned by the temperature in the ER. The thermostat on the wall was set to 60. I begged the stern ladies at the check-in desk to crank it up a few degrees.
They refused, so I took a photo of it and Tweeted it out. (Later, embarrassed hospital administrators contacted me to apologize for the frigid temps. Too cold, they agreed.)
Everyone was shivering, especially the people in damp bathing suits who’d arrived for treatment after beach accidents. Jellyfish stings, fish hooks, shark bites, that sort of thing.
The hospital quickly ran out of waiting-room blankets. People began fetching sandy beach blankets from their cars to ward off hypothermia.
I was alarmed by an elderly woman in a wheelchair whose husband keep shuffling up to the check-in desk to remind the harridans sitting there that his wife was suffering from chest pains. It was more than an hour before they finally wheeled her through those swinging doors. No apparent sense of urgency.
As the hours ticked away, the staff became increasingly surly and so did we. One clipboard-wielding woman shouted when I dashed out and returned with a 7-Eleven Slurpee for my son.
“He can’t have anything to drink!” she screamed across the waiting room.
I was in no mood.
“He’s thirsty,” I retorted. “Until we see a doctor, I’m in charge.”
By the time my son was assigned a curtained cubicle behind the double doors the hospital had also exhausted its supply of pillows. I phoned home and had my daughter bring one.
A few hours later an ER doc examined my son, shrugged and said he believed he was suffering from a simple stomach flu.
I was really in no mood.
“I ran his symptoms through WebMD and the diagnosis came back gall bladder,” I said.
The doctor rolled his eyes.
A couple of hours and a CT scan later the doctor came back and sheepishly told us our son had an infected gall bladder.
“Unusual in someone this age,” he muttered as he stalked away and we settled in to wait for a surgeon.
Fourteen hours in a pillow-less ER. I doubt even Covid conditions can top that.
