vent about emergancy room visit. update

[GUIENALADY]

here is a little background...i have not had a period in five years, so wed night start some abnormal heavy bleeding that last for 15 min. never happened before like that, but stops. then next morning it goes again for a half hour and slows down...so call regular dr and am told to go to emergancy room.

well get there about 12.30pm. ck in , get vitals and tell what is happening......5 and 1/2 hours later and several apologies from a nurse...but more important cases come first...i.e chest pain ect. Finally get in a room and the dr basicly says that nothing can be done other than a pelvic exam to see if i am bleeding......

probably to ck and see if i know what i am talking about...was his attitude....

I was more or less told go home and contact a gynacologist on monday.....did give me a name. fortunately for me things had pretty well stopped. guess i would have had to been gushing all over the place to be taken seriously.....

.

i am not a person to make a trip to the er unless i thought it was necessary. anyway went home and on fri i did call the gyn recomemded and told the nurse Kendra everything and she was TOTALLY ticked OFF ABOUT IT. how long i waited and the way i was treated. anyway will be seeing a dr on monday and hopefully start to find out what is going on.....

I did finally get an appt with a very nice dr did an exam , pap smear, cervix biopsy ect. got the results back today .....bad news is i do have uterine cancer, good news is can be cured with a total hysterectomy. sure hope he is correct on that. so can use any good thoughts and prayers. i have an appt with a specialist on the 19th to hopefully scheduale that and find out more .will let ya know.

 

[chickensducks&agoose]

I've worked in a few ERs, and really, they HATE gyno stuff. Unless you are in serious risk of bleeding to death, they won't do anything. Once, I got hit by lightening when I was pregnant, and went to the ER, hallucinating and totally soaked from the rain... their advice was to go home... if I started bleeding, I was having a miscarriage... if I didn't, I wasn't... not so helpful.

 

[chixie]

husband went to th emrgancy roon with chest pain. took him right back nurse and doctor came in . did some lab work. didn't see anyone again for 5 hours. called the nurse on call button cause he had to go to the bathroom. they said they would be right there. never showed up. dh unhooked all of the monitors and went to the bath room. walked in front of the nurses station out to his car and got a dip and walked right back in no one said a word and he didn't hook himself back up to the monitor. when they finally come in to release him dh said what if I had a heart attack . they said they were monitoring him at the nurses station and he said that was bull because he was not hooked up to the monitor for two hours. the docot released him and said he may have an ulcer. his regular doctor sent him for a stress test 3 weeks later and he ended up haveing an emergancy quadruple bypass. we turned the ER staff in to the head of the hospital. he was told by the surgeon that he was a walking timebomb.
I hope everthing is ok with you

 

[herfrds]

I know it is tough in an ER. These Dr's and nurses get some real doozies.

Hate saying it you went in at the worse possible time. Any Friday and with a full moon coming up.

I did a shift in our big hospitals ER on a Friday night a couple days before a full moon. I was suppose to be there 10 hours, ended up for 13 hours. They were short handed and every room was full until around 3am.
I know in bigger cities and hospitals it is worse.

Now i'm not making excuses for the long wait and the terrible bedside manners of that doc, but too many people use the ER as their primary care and they hate it at the ER's.


Before you say it, Yes I have had very poor care in our local ER. I call my medical director a quack because he is one. I was having an panic attack he read the EKG strip said I had heart disease and walked out the door. I had a stress test 2 days before and the cardioligist said there was no sign of heart disease.
Daughter got kicked by her horse on the right side of her stomach area and complained of it feeling like it was filling up. took her in one of the nurses asked where the on call person was, they came in the room and snapped at her that they were in the bathroom.
As the ambulance was preparing to take her to a larger hospital the on call told them to hurry up and get this kid out here because she didn't want her in her ER if she crashes.
Everybody turned and looked at me and one of the attendants I know stepped in front of me.

 

[Quillgirl]

I don't know where you live, or how large an ER you have, or how many physicians were on duty that visit, but your irregular bleeding would not be considered a critical life-threatening emergency in any ER. Because your life was not in danger, anything that came through while you were there, or anyone in a room ahead of you that you didn't see but was considered more critical than you would naturally be seen ahead of you. Chest pain is certainly more critical than irregular vaginal bleeding, head injuries, traumas, ambulance arrivals, codes on the other hospital floors (ER docs take care of those too) etc. If there were only 1 or 2 physicians on duty, coverage was thin and your non-emergent case was delayed. This is the nature of triage in an ER. It's not like your doctor's office where you are seen in order of arrival. An ER is not a substitute for a primary physician. It is there to treat critical and emergent problems. Do you have a "non-emergency clinic" in your area? That would have been a better bet.

Truthfully, your primary physician "passed the buck" by having you go to the ER rather than have you come to the office. Or he could have offered to meet you at the ER to take care of the problem himself. I am guessing you have no personal OBGYN you could have called because you were given the name of the on call guy rather than referred to your regular physician... Just know that there is very little that an ER physician can do to stop your bleeding (or for most non-critical GYN problems) other than give you a Rx for something like hormones to counteract the sudden onset and refer you to a GYN so that your problem could be addressed and monitored by someone who specializes in post menopausal issues.

Short answer is: yes, if you had been bleeding out, you would have moved up in line to a more critical level. That's how the ER works and what it is intended to do. The correct rant would be at your primary physician for sending you to an ER rather than help you himself, or at the least make a call and refer you to a GYN so that you wouldn't incur an ER charge just to get a referral. How crazy is that? What was he thinking?

As for why an ER would not want a certain kind of trauma there if she crashes, that might be because they do not have the surgical support system needed to save the girl if she begins failing. Many/most small hospitals do not have neurosurgical capabilities, or thoracic surgeons, or other specialty trauma surgeons or units to care for trauma. Those are usually found at larger trauma centers--which is where she needed to have gone first. So if the horse kick had internal bleeding, there may have been no way to save her at that hospital if she crashed, yet they would have had to stabilize her before another hospital would take the transfer. So you would have been caught between a rock and hard place, no? No support at the hospital, but they'd have to jump hoops to get her to a place that would save her. Better to get her to a place, very quickly, that could save her. Not waste time signing her in, making a chart, etc. when she needed to be speeding to the right hospital.

 

[EweSheep]

Quote:
I agree! ER is spread pretty thin around here and we take advantage of Express Care but they do not open 24 hours a day like the ER does. That is why its a problem when Express Care have limited hours.

 

[Hippie Chicks Mom]

Coming from an ER nurse here: I have to agree with the wisdom of the doctor's office "passing the buck". That's exactly what they do on a REGULAR basis. They have a full schedule, don't want to fit you in, to cover liability they advise "go to ER". Our ER is FULL of patients that the family doctor should have seen and treated. And unfortunately they are left waiting. Bleeding that is not life threatening, broken bones, tooth aches, the flu are all at the bottom of the list when patients with stroke symptoms, head injuries and heart attacks come in. The key is EMERGENCY. Your life is in imminent danger. They stabilize the problem and get you to the appropriate
specialist/surgery etc.

I feel for you. You should have been seen by your doctor. Next time, INSIST your doctor work you in, in a timely manner. The most the ER would have done, was what they did do. Assess you and determine if you are medically stable and advise you of what you need to do next...usually see your primary doctor!!!! Good luck to you and don't forget to stand up to your doctor and insist he treat you! Don't let him make you wait in an emergency waiting room unneccesarily. They abuse the system.

 

[SilverPhoenix]

I agree with the last few posters. It sounds like your doctor was being irresponsible sending you to the ER for a problem that he should have seen you for. Doctor's offices are open at that time, he could have squeezed you in somehow! I know doctors are on a tight schedule and all, but he or a gyno could have helped you a lot more than the ER did, and without that unnecessary wait. Triage is a tough system sometimes if you're not as critical as other patients, but it has to be done when there are too many patients and not enough staff. My wildlife rehab group has the same thing. If we get in a bird that's bleeding badly and a bird with a broken wing, we help the bird that's bleeding badly first because there's more at stake and it requires immediate attention.

Sorry you had that experience! I hope your gyno helps you fix the issue, whatever it may be.

 

[EweSheep]

Quote:
I had that with my own family doc's receptionist kept delaying my call backs for appointments and I ended up in the Express Care even for a freaking routine BP check to make sure I am doing ok. We have told our family doc about it and he said he will take care of her about her "slacking" off but still has her!

I do not know how many times we have called her and she never called us back so therefore unless it is urgent, we go to Express Care and even we do not "own" a primary physician even we use his name for primary information.....I've asked those wonderful Express docs to see if they do have their own practice and they said no, unfortunately because of they were being so priced out by insurances, Medicaid and the whole system that they decided to get out of it. If I do make an appointment with my own physician, it would take me a month wait for my appointment and what if I have an ear infection or sinus infection that can not be waited for a month??!! You are right Hippie, "passing the buck" is BAD!

 

[Quillgirl]

If you just need a quick BP check, try your local fire department. Our will do it quickly, and for free.