Seventeen

I was sitting at work this morning (early morning - I get to work before 7) and my friend Ande called. She said she had spent the night barfing up her lunch and there was an unidentifiable pain "like where the stomach goes into the small intestine." Sounds probable - an inflammation or an ulcer or something? Certainly gastrointestinal. She called her doc and couldn't get an appointment for another three weeks, so she called the Ask-a-Nurse hotline at the hospital. The nurse said, "Well, with unidentified chest pain, we need to rule out that you have an aneurism, so please go to the ER." Ande was upset by that - she knew it wasn't an aneurism, and that she would waste many hours in an ER when what she really needed to do was sleep and rest and maybe have some chicken soup. But she has a history of aneurisms in her family, and she's a good patient, i.e., she does what she's told by the experts, and so she went to the ER.

I joined her there. It was 9 AM.

In the first hour she was triaged, which meant they took her vitals, had some blood taken, and she had an EKG. Then we sat and waited. She still hadn't been seen, or had any tests scheduled, seventeen hours later.

SEVENTEEN HOURS LATER!

At 2 in the morning, one of her friends who works as a nurse in the ER and had come on duty at midnight plopped down exhausted in the chair next to her. Ande works at the hospital, too, as an administrative manager in the nurse residency program, so she knows a lot of nurses. The nurse said she glanced over her blood tests and everything looked okay. She didn't look at the EKG but if there had been any signs of an aneurism, Ande would've moved up the list and been seen earlier. As it was, the nurse said Ande probably wouldn't be seen for another four or five hours. There had been a small plane crash earlier in the day, and some other disasters, and the hospital is full, so they were in the throes of a Code Purple, which meant that every bed in the ER was occupied, so no other patients could be seen - there just wasn't any place for them to be examined and treated, and no place to move the examined and treated patients who needed to be admitted. A bottleneck, pure and simple.

After the conversation with the nurse, I asked Ande what she expected would happen once she was seen, and she said that she would probably get an order to have a gastroscopy in the next couple of weeks. There wasn't really anything else they could do for her. I asked Ande if it was worth it to hang in. She said that she felt we both had too much invested - a combination of 34 hours of waiting so far - to abandon ship now. Besides, if she waited three weeks to see her doctor, it would delay the whole diagnosis.

A half hour later, the nurse friend returned and said there had been no movement of patients in or out, so nobody would be seen until noon. That was enough for Ande - we abandoned ship, hugged goodbye in the parking lot, and went our separate ways.

I got home around 3:00 AM to find my poor nervous nelly of a cat had pulled tufts of hair out of his flanks. There were little orange tufts everywhere. Sorry, Nikos, it was an emergency, sweetheart. We've been snuggling ever since I returned, a little snooze here and there. I'm achey all over from the waiting room chair and my mind's abuzz with thoughts, rants and emotional turmoil about the experience. Otherwise, I'm toast.

Needless to say, Ande's feeling like hell this morning. She says she cried all the way home and got little sleep, that her back is killing her and she has a splitting headache but she was able to eat a few rice crackers without getting nauseaus. She's going to try to recover from her sleepless night spent barfing, and the subsequent ordeal in the ER, by resting all weekend. I'll drop in on her tomorrow, maybe bring her some chicken soup. She says her stomach is still hurting.