As I’ve mentioned before in my blog, I have a very sick mother. She has been in the Emergency Rooms of every hospital in our city many times over the past 20 years.
Even a simple cold or flu can quickly turn into pneumonia and in 24 hours she'll lose the ability to breathe.
Her lungs are pumping, pumping, pumping for air but she gets so little oxygen into her blood stream that she suffocates.
That's when I call 911. The paramedics arrive, give her a shot to open up her lungs and hook her up to an oxygen tank. Then the ambulance arrives to transport her to the Emergency Room. (whichever one is accepting patients)
It can be really scary. What’s more scary is when I’m riding around in the front of the ambulance with the driver and he gets the call over the radio that all the ER's are “Red Light”. That means they are all full and NONE of them are accepting patients.
The first time this happened I said to the driver, “This is some sort of joke, right?”
It wasn’t. I asked him, “So what do we do now, just drive around?”
He said, “I’m afraid so. We drive around about mid-way between the two main hospitals so that when we get a ‘Green Light’ from one of them, we can go there.”
On one particular trip to the ER, Mom got an actual bed right away. NOT parked in the ER hallway. I was so grateful. But then she lay in that bed struggling for each breath for the next 10 hours. Nobody came to examine her or even check on her.
Now the trick in the ER is to be persistent with the Personnel but not to actually annoy them. Because if you annoy them, they will purposely make your waiting time longer. (I swear to God it’s true. They’ve actually been so hostile and have admitted to me that’s what they are doing)
For those of you who haven’t had the “Alberta ER Experience” this is how it is suppose to go:
1) you are admitted to a bed
2) A doctor examines you and orders whatever tests he/she thinks you need
3) Various people come to do the tests on you
4) The doctor comes back to look at the test results and make a diagnosis and prescribe a treatment.
Now that’s still the procedure, the problem is that it can now take anywhere from 8 to 48 hours for that to be done.
(What did that comedian say once, “I don’t want to do something that feels GOOD for 48 hours!”)
Because Mom has many health problems she is on a large amount of different drugs. (Including 3 different types of painkillers) But in the ER if the doctor hasn’t made his diagnosis (step # 4), you get no medication. Not even your usual pills. Also, until that diagnosis, No Food and sometimes NOT EVEN A GLASS OF WATER.
I sat next to Mom, on this specific occasion, and watched her struggle for breath. Every hour or so, I would go to the nurses station an ask (again) if they knew when the doctor would be arriving. Yet I have to make sure me and my questions aren’t interpreted as me “being a nuisance” or they will never come to attend to Mom.
Even when I asked if I could get her something to eat or drink the answer was, “Not until the doctor says so”.
So I go back to my chair and watch. And watch. And watch. As a writer, I do a lot of watching all the time anyway, but you would be surprised what I’ve seen during my massive amount of hours in the ER. I can state without exaggeration, “The closest you will get to the pit of hell in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, is it’s Emergency Rooms.”
So this particular time I was sitting and watching and I couldn’t help but notice this janitor. He was a young man who looked not much past his his teen years. He was wandering everywhere.
He would roam around not doing much of anything. Visiting the nurses. Making jokes with the nurses. Flirting with the nurses.
At the point when I went to the nurses station to ask if I could get a cup and give Mom a drink of water (and denied) this young janitor was sitting on one of those office chairs that spin and he was … spinning. He would see how dizzy he could make himself and then stand up and see if he could walk a straight line. The nurses seem to find this very funny. (It might have been, but I wasn’t in much of a humorous mood at the time).
I went back to my chair next to Mom. She asked if I had gotten her the water and I just had to say, “Sorry. They said no water.”
As I sat there I noticed that the janitor hadn’t actually done much janitorial work. When I first saw him, he was rolling one of those yellow buckets with the mop in it around and around the ER but not actually taking the mop out to clean a floor. I figured he must be the hospital director’s nephew or something because I watched him for 6 hours and never saw him do anything that resembled work.
Finally, at the 10th hour of our stay, a nurse came in and said the doctor would be in momentarily. You could have heard my sigh from a mile away. At that point I would have been grateful just for Mom to get some water. Her fever was high and her lips were dry and cracked.
About 15 minutes later the doctor comes around the corner with his clip board. He jerks back the curtain that partially hid Mom’s bed and introduced himself in a business like manner.
“Hello. I’m Dr. [ ]. What seems to be the trouble today?”
You’ll never guess but ... It was the “Janitor”!
I sat there with my mouth open. I’d been watching him for hours doing NOTHING. He was sitting right there when I asked for the glass of water and still he didn’t come over and see Mom. UGH!
When I finally gathered my wits about me, all I seemed to be able to do was just glare at him.
He did a quick examination of Mom and noticed some bruising on her arm. Part of Mom’s disease is that she gets bruises all over her body that come and go. But when Dr. 'Janitor' saw the bruises he looked at me suspiciously.
He asked Mom forcefully, “How did you get these bruises Mrs. Rahn?!”
At that point Mom was in pretty bad shape. Besides the pneumonia, she had a 103 temperature and was dehydrated. She looked at me to help her with the answer and she responded,
“I don’t know. How did I get them Laura-Lee?” (poor Mom)
The doctor must have thought I inflicted them, was abusing her and then coaching her on what to say about them. Then he started glaring at me. Giving me the dirty looks you reserve for Senior abusers and child molesters. But the interesting thing was I was so angry with him for leaving Mom to suffer for so long, the look I was glaring back at him was even worse than the look he was giving me. If ignoring suffering people the way he did isn’t classified as abuse, I don’t know what is.
After looking at my face, I think he decided not to make a fuss about the bruises on Mom's arm and quickly ordered a bunch of tests for her and quickly left to see the next patient.
Then he saw another patient and another and another ... He went to 7 patients after Mom. Some of whom had been suffering worse than Mom and calling out for help. Help that didn’t come. I watched him spend less than 5 minutes with each of his patients and when he went back to the nurses station, he put on his jacket, announced he was “checking out” and went home for the day. His shift was apparently over. He would leave the diagnosis and treatment for the next doctor.
The worse part of all this? …
I consider this one of the lighter moments in ER. One of the easiest trips Mom made there.
“Oh, I could a tale unfold.” – Shakespeare
Another time when Mom went to the ER, she spent an entire day in the hallway. Three nurses shifts lasting 8 hours each. (for those of you not great with math, 3x8=24) Twenty-four hours in a hallway. But we weren’t the only people with problems that day either. There was a little boy there (6 years old) who had arrived BEFORE us and was still there AFTER Mom got out of the hallway and into a bed.
A dog had bit him in the nose and ripped most of if off. He sat in a chair (with his Mom and Dad standing next to him), and a wad of bloody Kleenex tissues held to his nose. His Mom was speaking words of comfort to him and his Dad was pacing and trying to keep from going insane. (for more than 24 hours)
At one point his Dad finally blew a fit and demanded for them to get a doctor. A nurse told him the hold up was that they were waiting for a specific plastic surgeon to arrive. She said to the Dad, “You don’t want your son to be scarred for life, do you?”
He backed down. But another 10 hours later and he didn’t care if his son was scarred or not. He demanded to see a doctor. Any doctor. The nurse said they were still waiting for the plastic surgeon. He couldn’t be reached because he was on a golf course and didn’t have his cell phone with him.
(I kid you not)
Mom was lying in the hallway with a broken back that day, so I had lots of time to talk with this family.
I couldn’t leave Mom alone in the hallway with a broken back but I managed to find the store room and ransacked it for Kleenex.
All I did was bring this small family a couple of little boxes of Kleenex tissue and they were so grateful, you’d have thought I was the angel Gabriel descended from on high.
Story after story I have in my mind:
People vomiting and not getting help or even a basin to throw up in.
People left laying in their own diarrhea for hours.
People freezing and shivering from shock, calling out with chattering teeth for help and being completely ignored.
They don't even have enough pillows for everyone to have one.
People going without food for a couple of days.
There is one thing that most of the people who work in the Emergency Room don’t understand, that it is within THEIR POWER to stop it from being “The Pit” (as they call it) and make it a place of mercy and healing.
When I’m in Emergency with Mom, I do the most simple of things: bring Kleenex, get a blanket from the warming oven, get them a kidney basin to throw up in, find a sheet they can use as a pillow, bring a waiting family member a cup of coffee.
Sometimes I can’t do any of that. Sometimes it’s just a listening ear so they can vent their fears. (Because, I’m convinced, one of the greatest pains this world will ever know is for a person to watch someone they love suffering and being completely helpless to stop it because your pleas for help are falling on deaf ears)
As a Christian, so many people ask me, “How can you believe in a God who allows suffering?”
Let me answer by saying this, “I’ve never seen God cause suffering, but I’ve seen people cause plenty of it. So I ask you this:
‘How can you believe in PEOPLE who would allow suffering?’
‘How can medical personnel be trained to help, then not?’
‘How can they be paid to do the basic of ministrations and forsake them?’
‘How can they listen to the constant cries for help and mercy and turn a deaf ear and a blind eye?’
‘How can the people at Alberta Health Services who are responsible for this and who have the power to stop so much of this suffering, sleep at night or look at themselves in the mirror?’”
You answer MY questions and then I’ll answer yours!
Laura-Lee Was Here
