Pete Dodd Dot Com (.us)

Whenever I play Super Street Fighter 4 with my internet mates someone eventually gets crushed in a match and blames the matchup and the joke is “I’m going to write a strongly worded letter to Seth Killian about ____ (insert egregious offense that was just unleashed on you here).”  Seth Killian is a community rep for Capcom, the company that makes SSFIV, and the joke may have an older meaning that I don’t know, but to me it’s always been about feeling helpless and your only bit of recourse is to be one of those old ladies that writes letters to her favorite cereal about how the last time she bought it that it tasted like shit and how when the company gets said letter they will look at it and laugh but maybe send that old bitty a free box to shut her up.

Well I guess for a long time now this blog has been my collection of letters to Seth Killian, but usually about random bullshit going on in my life.  After last night, however, it’s about something that is actually real…  and the feeling of helplessness I felt while there has forced me into the role of penning an angry letter (well, angry essay is more like it).  I’m not sure if it’s actually going to be sent or not, or to who, or whatever.  Maybe it will just exist here, though I’m guessing more than a few people will google the exact phrase of the title of this piece and maybe stumble upon this and we can commiserate over how terrible this hospital is, though i doubt they will send us a free box of cereal.

The back story is fairly simple.  Arnee (my wife, pronounced Ar-Nay)was having sharp, sudden pain in what she assumed was her left Ovary.  About 12 years ago or so she had cists on them so she knows the area pretty well.  After a couple of days of the pain increasing in frequency (once every 8 hours to once every 10 minutes) I finally convinced her to go to the doctor (a complete role-reversal for us).  We went to see our new doc a few blocks away…  he pushed in and did other doctor stuff but admitted that he wasn’t a OBGYN but that the pain worried him.  He thought an ultrasound would be needed but couldn’t get Arnee in till tomorrow.  We thought about it and decided to go to the ER because the increasing frequency of the pain had us worried enough that spending another night at home not knowing what it was could have been a nightmare.  He suggested we go to Lutheran Medical Center and he called a doctor friend there to try to expedite the whole process.

We got there and the first waiting room was pretty packed but we only sat there for 45 minutes or so before being admitted and put in the triage area.  Once in there that number of people was staggering.  We sat down and waited.  And waited.  And waited.  And waited.  Several hours later a doctor (I think her scrubs said RPA –  I’m not up on hospital lingo, but people refered to her as a doctor so I assume she was) saw Arnee for maybe 3 minutes.  She pushed on her stomach a few times and decided she needed an ultrasound.

So then we waited and waited and waited and waited and then we got sent up to the Ultrasound area.  When we got there Arnee asked if she could have some water, as she was told earlier not to have any, and the nurse said yes.  Arnee went in for the ultrasound and the tech scolded her and the nurse for drinking water.  Nice that they are all on the same page.

So then that finished and we went back to triage and waited and waited and waited and waited.  At one point all visitors were kicked out for “shift change.”  During that i was in the outside waiting room.  I overheard one woman say that her mother was admitted 20 hours earlier via ambulance and still didn’t have a room.  Other people started relaying their current horror stories.

So i finally got to go back in and Arnee was nearly in tears and having a panic attack.  I understand that they need to clear the ER out of visitors from time to time, but it’s certainly not good for the patients, especially someone like Arnee (or me, if it was me) who is likely to freak out and potentially go into shock.  But that’s what this hospital does.  There was not one time during our 10 and a half hours there that I felt like the hospital gave a shit about the human beings inside of it.  We were all just an annoyance to the staff.  It was busy, which sucks, but to them it’s like they were accountants and we were math equations in a giant pile that they were pissed off they had to solve.  Work would be so much easier if these fucking people would just stop being sick!

And as an aside, for those that don’t know me, I am a caregiver myself.  I work in a much more controlled environment (a group home) than an ER, but there are basic rules that I know need to be followed.  If you are frustrated you don’t show it.   When you are frustrated you must realize that it’s not the people who are taking care of fault.  They still deserve your best level of care.  In fact, when things are hectic, that’s when you need to up your game, so to speak, because the people you are tasked with caring for are at far greater risk for something going wrong.

I’m not going to pretend i know what it’s like to work in an ER, because to be honest this was my first time ever being in one other than the outside waiting rooms.  I have avoided them like the plague.  I do have a feeling, backed up from many conversations with family and friends, that this situation at Lutheran Medical Center is pretty much how all ERs in cities work.  I’m sure ones in the suburbs and richer, less populated areas probably operate with a bit higher standards.  But im guessing that Lutheran Medical Center is not alone in being terrible.  And I’m guessing that working in a busy ER is thankless, tiring, frustrating work and that probably does not pay enough for stress level endured.  As much as I had anger at each individual person that couldn’t care less about my wife, I had even more anger for the entire system being so utterly fucked up that this level of care is not only tolerated, it’s the goddamn norm.

Anyway, so a few hours after the Ultrasound the doctor (RPA?) came back and told Arnee she didn’t see anything and wanted to get a Catscan.  Thirty minutes after that a nurse came over to prep her for it (prepping for in involves drinking a liquid 1.5 hours in advance).  At this point the catscan was scheduled for 2am.  We got there at 6pm.  It’s been eight hours if you don’t want to do the math.  And just to recap, so far in this 8 hours Arnee has seen the doctor for 4 minutes total and gotten one Catscan.  She also was attended to by a nurse (hooking up an IV, etc) for another 5 minutes.   So 9 minutes of care and 1 test in 480 minutes.  That means that 99.99% of the time we’ve been here she was not tended to.  Literally!  I DID THE MATH!

And hell, im not even asking for much more time spent, just more check ins.  Going 3 hours without hearing anything is frustrating but even worse, it causes a great amount of anxiety.  Arnee had cancer when she was a teenager.  She went through chemo and eventually beat it.  She also had a child that passed several hours after birth.  This is a woman who has experienced great medical trauma in her life.  When she has shooting pains in her ovaries it’s going to cause a GREAT amount of concern.  Is it cancer?  Is in Ectopic Pregnancy?  Is this going to make her infertile?  Is something rupturing and her life is in danger?  Is this one of those “that thing almost killed me but they found it in time?” type of things?

I’ll be fucked if the staff there was going to tell us anything.  Simply put, they don’t care.  Oh, another anxious couple with lower stomach pain, it’s probably gas, send them home.

So, yeah, the 2am Catscan turned into the 2:30 Catscan without them ever updating us about it.  But at 2:30 they sent us over, which the person there promptly sent us back because Arnee was not dressed properly for it which “they should have known” according to the tech.   We eventually get back and the Catscan is done.  The tech says the doctor will have the results in 30 minutes.  It’s 3:10 at this point.

We sit there for about an hour and 30 minutes, asking around the one hour mark if the doctor has gotten the catscan results yet.  The answer we get is “NO” and get shot looks like we are giant fucking assholes for even asking the question.  At 4:40am the doctor comes over and says “There is a little bit of inflammation in your lower intestine, we are going to give you a script for cipro and something for the pain.”   And then she walked away.

Cipro?  I know from the 2001 Anthrax scare that Cipro is an antibiotic.   Ok, so it’s an infection?  How did she get it?  Where is it?  Is it bad?  Is there anything we could have done to prevent it or prevent it in the future?  What would have happened if it went untreated?

Yeah, we didn’t get to ask any of those questions.  And furthermore, we don’t really trust the diagnosis in the first place.   Arnee has had incredible pain for days, including a bout with wicked diarrhea the night before that she thinks was from something bad she ate.  Could that be the cause of the inflammation?  Probably.  Is it the cause of the shooting pain in her ovary?  Not likely.

But even if it is the right diagnosis, it’s just a simple infection, a little bit of an explanation as to why it exists would have been helpful.  At this point I had zero faith in anything this hospital was doing.  We were seated by the nurses station for the last couple hours of the night and all they did was bitch.  They bitched about the computer systems, they bitched about how busy it was earlier (it had emptied out quite a bit by this point), they bitched about having nothing to do, they bitched about whatever nurse wasn’t there, one nurse proclaimed she is no longer writing notes on patient’s records.  Add that to how little care we got, how they sent us to a catscan with arnee wearing clothes with metal in them, to how the whole goddamn operation was run… and what i came away with was that I didn’t trust a goddamn word out of their mouths.  They no longer get the benefit of the doubt from me.  And the second you don’t trust your doctors is the second they become fucking worthless.

I think the doctor looked at the catscan, saw a little inflammation which is obviously there — I mean I COULD HAVE TOLD YOU BEFORE WE EVEN GOT THERE THAT THEY WOULD FIND INFLAMMATION!  SHE’S IN FUCKING PAIN OF COURSE THERE IS! — and she decided to just wash her hands of the whole thing by writing a script for Cipro and sending us on our way.  So 10.5 hours later we still don’t know shit and we got a script that we could have gotten from a walk-in clinic in fucking Ethiopia.  And i can pretty much guarantee to you that the bill is north of $1000, probably by quite a bit.

This shit needs to change and it needs to change now.  I don’t care if it’s “Obamacare” or what… but it needs to fucking change.  Our healthcare is a goddamn joke.  The republicans seem to think the whole system will be fixed by putting caps on how much you can sue doctors.  I’m all for them putting caps on that, but let’s be fucking serious –  that’s not the reason why our healthcare sucks.  I don’t know if Obamacare fixes it either, i would guess it probably doesn’t, but atleast it’s a fucking attempt.  I’m sure its problem is that it doesn’t go far enough.

The solution for Arnee and I is that we don’t go to shitty hospital ERs ever again unless we are unconscious.  We have health insurance, a car, are white, etc etc.  We can drive to some nice place in Long Island and get better care, and that’s what we will do from now on.  But even though that works for us, that doesn’t fix the system.  And it certainly doesn’t fix Lutheran Medical Center, which in ten and a half hours did not do a single thing right.