Hospital Mayhem Game Not Too Far Off the Mark

Apparently, an entire afternoon spent irate, bitter, and thoroughly profane just wasn't enough for one day. After calming down with some quality time spent with the kitchen and various family members making peach pie (beating dough is intensely theraputic...) later in the afternoon, I thought things would've gotten back to a relative level of normalcy around the house. Alas, for it was just not meant to be.

At about 10:30 pm, just after I thought I'd written enough of a day's summary to satisfy any avid reader, my brother had a medical emergency of a moderate but nevertheless concerning nature and needed to be taken to the emergency room at Alta Bates hospital.

Suffice to say that the events that followed were of an absolutely ridiculous, appalling nature. After being forced to wait in a fairly crowded waiting room for an hour and a half, we were trucked to a room and, well, made to wait about half an hour more before a nurse practitioner came in to assess the situation and request some blood. This, of course, seemed to rile up my brother a good deal, as both he and I have an acute and somewhat violent fear of needles (though over the years, I've managed to reduce the urge to scream and require restraints to an urge to curse profusely) - and well, this obviously was the last thing we needed to hear, having needed to calm him down from his original panicked, unbearable state. His fears of doctors and needles, of course, were in no way allayed when the incompetent nurse practitioners failed to find a proper vein in his arm (apparently he's got "bad veins" that idiot nurses seem inclined to mine for with needles rather than exercise care). One nurse came in, failed, and then fetched another nurse who promptly failed as well, despite having been informed that his veins were difficult to find - after this second failure, of course, they decided to leave his poor arms alone for a bit. Read "a bit" to be approximately an hour. Of waiting. Nothing but pure waiting.

Of course, after waiting two hours in the ER, and STILL no sign of a real doctor anywhere around, my father was about ready to tear them a new one verbally, and was about ready to leave - my brother's medical condition had seemingly improved after ingestion of the Tylenol. The workers no doubt sensed his general disgust and proceeded to truck us to a different room where we were promised that a doctor would see my brother in a timely manner. At this point, the time was about half past midnight, and my father was really ready to pack up and go home in 15 minutes if a doctor didn't arrive.

Oh little did he know that he'd be subjecting himself to this bull for at least 3 and a half more hours.

A doctor did finally arrive to find a particularly testy family and a fairly riled up brother of mine... only to request a urine sample, a possible ultrasound, and, whoopdie, blood. Failing to acquire blood, they seemed fine with busying themselves analyzing a cup of whizz for about 1 and a half hours, only to find "nothing wrong" with my brother.

Well obviously, finding "nothing wrong" meant "let's do an ultrasound tonight, because it surely can't wait until tomorrow morning and we can charge the insurance company." And thusly, we were informed of its necessity, though, again, the results could possibly prove inconclusive. Of course this meant another half hour of waiting for the technician to be called, then the performance of the ultrasound, and then some more waiting for the results. At this point, my father deemed that it was time to pay a visit to the vending machines.

During our stay at the hospital, I witnessed two appalling events that have since made me lose every last shred of what little respect I had for doctors, nurse practitioners, and biologists. The first one being the way an elderly woman with breathing problems was treated with little to no thought to her welfare - the poor woman was placed in a tiny room to fester in her own squalor, wheezing and gasping for water. Not a single person paid attention to the fact that she was attempting to contact the medical personnel, and it was only when someone walked by her room and noticed her not breathing that they did something to attempt to roust her, in which case they suddenly became concerned that she'd kicked it and made valiant attempts to revive her. The second disturbing event was the fact that the person behind the curtain next to us had gotten to the point where her pain was making her cry out - no one had been paying any attention to pain management until it had become unbearable for her. It terrifies me to realize with just how little regard patients are attended to unless they are visibly gushing forth gallons of blood or flatlining because of heinously understaffed emergency rooms and vicious bureaucracy.

At about 4 am, my brother was released from the ER, having been told that he had an infection that would either go away on its own or could be aided with some simple antibiotics - a diagnosis that took a total of 30 minutes, and 4 and half hours waiting. My brother would like me to point out that he now "walks with a lack of alacrity."

Apologies for the poorly written log... but I am so tired...

Further bulletins as events warrant.