Healthcare EMERGENCY

 My "healthcare" experience last night. 

I've been taking a combination of steroids and blood thinners for a week due to a struggle with some kind of rare skin disorder that's taken 8 months to diagnose (a thread for another day) At 5pm last night after I packed up my laptop and got ready to leave the office I started telling my coworkers about a podcast they should listen to when blood started running out of my nose. 

Oh my god! What's happening? My coworkers gave me tissues that quickly soaked in blood. I think I'll just hold this here, go to the bathroom, clean up, and head home. The blood would not stop. I put my head back (not what you wanna do), and blood gushed down my throat, choking me. Thankfully, my co-worker Brian was still in the office. Completely helpless, I asked him to google "How to stop a nosebleed," and he called his girlfriend, who is a nurse, for advice. We decided we needed to go to Urgent Care. All the info online said, "Pinch the nose for 15 minutes. If it lasts longer than that, "seek immediate medical attention." It had been an hour, and it was not stopping. Brian drove me to urgent care, where we were promptly turned away. Go to the ER. It's close. 

We went to Highland Park Hospital. It's an Endeavor Health hospital. Great. They have all my info. This will speed things along, or so I thought. Nope. We sat in the ER waiting room for 1 hour before I got triaged (the nurse put a plastic clothespin on my nose) at which time they informed us that the last person to get to see a Dr. had been waiting 7 hours. They were full. They were unable to empty any beds in the ER because the hospital was full. They were waiting for rooms to move people out of the ER into hospital beds to make room for more emergencies. Meanwhile, they are helping people with IVs and taking people to x-rays from the waiting room because there was nowhere else to go. I told the triage nurse that by the time I wait several hours my nose will likely have stopped bleeding. What would a doctor even do at that point? Answer: Chemically cauterize or pack your nose. So at this point, I'm really just waiting for my husband to show up. 

 

By the time my David arrived, the bleeding seemed to have slowed. He suggested we check hospital ERs by us. We called Swedish and Evanston, both ERs had 20+ waiting for care and a 9-hour wait. (Gag alert) At 10:30 I coughed up a huge blood clot the size of a clementine and felt better. Took the clip off my nose to see if the bleeding had ceased. It had. At 11:30 pm we headed home.

People there had wounds wrapped in gauze, throwing up in buckets, and lifeless, feverish children. I had a bloody nose. There was nothing immediate or urgent about the "care" anyone received. It was seriously unbelievable. This country has a healthcare crisis. Everyone I talked to about the wait at the hospital and on the phone to other hospitals were simply matter-of-fact about the insane wait. Unfazed. Bored even. It's always like this. Shrug. I've been going to ERs fairly regularly since my mom was diagnosed with cancer in 2017. It's gotten significantly and exponentially worse over the past 7 years. I can't wait to learn how much I'm billed for the plastic nose clip.