This blog is not intended to weigh in on the health care debate. This is simply an incident that happened about a year ago. It was related to me by a friend and I dutifully logged it in my writer’s notebook to use later.
A Friend I work with went to one of the minor emergency clinics for a small problem. Just after she completed her paper work and sat in the waiting room, a man came in complaining of chest pains and shortness of breath. The receptionist took his information and sent him to sit in the waiting room near Friend. He looked sort of peaked and she offered to move off the couch so he could lie down, but he declined. Then a man came in bleeding from a cut on his head. He was holding a towel on the wound and using it to sop the blood that oozed down the side of his face. He filled out the form and took a seat near Friend and the man trying to breathe.
In a few minutes, a woman stepped inside and said, “A man getting out of his car passed out in the parking lot.” A couple of nurses went to check, came back and got a wheelchair. That man was taken back to an exam room. (We heard later that when he roused he said he needed to use the bathroom. He passed out there and split his head open on the sink.)
Presently, an older woman brought her adult son into the office. He had had a seizure at home and had fallen in the kitchen and a knife (or something) had sliced his face. You got it. The patient and his mother were told to wait. Just as they joined the man who kept grunting and massaging his left shoulder and the other man who was holding the blood soaked towel on his noggin, the young man had a grand mal seizure.
His mother pointed out that he was choking and nurses and the doctor came to help. The boy revived and the doctor asked the mom what meds he was on. “His doctor is changing his medicine,” she said. And to demonstrate how well that was working out, the kid had another seizure, witnessed by the older man with the purple-tinted face and the other man who continued to apply pressure to his head wound.
Unfortunately, I don’t have an end to this story because at that point, Friend decided that in the scheme of things her boil didn’t hurt so much after all and she left.
Like I said … not weighing in on one side or the other. Just telling how it was one crazy day.