Happy Friday the 13th!

UglyBear

Well-Known Member
So, I greeted Friday the 13th in one of our award-winning SoMD emergency rooms. Following is an observational ode to people stuck waiting in emergency rooms at 1AM.

The people whom I feel the most pity for are parents of little kids. Kid takes a fall, hits their head, or had a fever and a rash, and being a good parent, you rush them to the hospital. Wait for four hours, with the kid waaay past bedtime, cranky, bored, scared, just to go in, get five minute check-up, be told “maybe they have a concussion, nothing we can do, take some Tylenol and go home”.

Another set of people who deserve compassion are the not-so-young-themselves caretakers of the elderly. They have a job to go to the next morning, their own kids to drop off at school, but the geriatric parent has some kind of crisis, so you are stuck there, holding their arthritic hand and repeating “Mom, it will be ok”. These people are superheroes.

Then there are, and forgive me the controversial term, trash people. Not the hard-working sanitation people, but humans with no reason to be in the emergency room, who are trolling for either drugs or money.

Had one such character there last night. He kept going around the waiting room, re-telling some BS story, getting a buck here, a quarter there. Trolling for a ride to DC or a place to sleep. Getting personal details out of people, and really concentrating on young females.
At some not-so-distant point in time, the sheriff would collect such people and drop them off over the county line, or in DC. Maybe we should get back to that.

In the end, after waiting for four hours, I decided that my injury is not that bad after all, and went home. Don’t get sick or injured, the hospital might be the worst part of it.
 

UglyBear

Well-Known Member
Two take-aways from this experience:
1) Emergency room rules = prison rules. Stake out a spot by the wall with visible approaches, keep to yourself, don’t engage with the crazy, do your own time.

2) get at least one person in the house basic medical training — something like wilderness medicine classes. Invest in a good home medical kit, including surgical stapler, and eye care kit.
 
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