“911…Can You Hold Please?”

What if armed bad guys broke into your home and had you trapped? What if you then risked life and limb to get to your phone so that you could call for help? What if your only hope was to call 911? What if you called them and got a recording that said “I’m sorry but we can’t get to the phone right now…”? That would probably be a nightmare in anybody’s book right? Well thank God that is not the case where we live. 911 is a Emergency Response Service and they are good at what they do. However I recently had an experience with another type of emergency response service that made me re-examine my understanding of the word Emergency.
This is a true story…partially
More... This past Saturday night I found myself at the hospital Emergency Room. I’ve had a few cuts and scrapes in my life; so I’m no stranger to the ER, but this particular visit was so noteworthy that I thought I’d share it with you.

Maybe I should’ve seen it as a bad sign that when I walked over to the ‘check-in counter’ there was nobody sitting there. Not a problem, maybe they had just stepped away from their post a split-second before I walked in the door. After only a few minutes, a semi-pleasant person came over and offered to assist me. I took a seat and the receptionist promptly asked me about the nature of my problem. I don’t know a lot about medical terminology, but I did my best to describe to her the pain that I was having. I told her that it was serious enough to wake me up in the middle of the night and make me drive across town to hospital. I guess I didn’t do a very good a job because instead of quickly addressing my issue, the lady kept on asking me questions. She asked me for my address, phone number and about my insurance provider. I patiently answered all her questions and felt encouraged, thinking that now I could get some help. Little did I know that this evening’s fun was just beginning. My next stop was an empty waiting room where I was told to have a seat and that ‘Someone Will Be Right with You’. The waiting room was hospital clean and boasted a very nice flat screen TV with cable, but it’s hard to really enjoy it when you’re in pain and waiting to see a doctor. Fifteen agonizingly long minutes later, someone called my name and took me into another room and began asking me more questions in addition to taking my temperature and my weight.

So now thirty minutes have passed since I walked into this Emergency room and nobody has done anything about my pain. I’m seriously beginning to feel like I might have done better by going to see a witch doctor or something. Then the nurse asked me to go to yet another room where I was again given that familiar line of ‘Someone Will Be Right with You’. I had no smile left as I walked into this room and I was feeling anything but better. I’m no dummy; I know a pattern when I see one, so this time I told myself that ‘nobody is going to come into this room to see about me for at least twenty minutes’. This way I wouldn’t be disappointed or further aggravated. Well to my surprise it only took ten minutes for a man – let’s call him Dr. Sleepy, to come into my room. I’ll bet you can’t guess what Dr. Sleepy did? ‘Cured me of all my ills’? No. ‘Gave me something to ease the pain’? No. If your guess was ‘Asked me more questions’ then you’re absolutely right! I don’t know what bothered me more; the fact that I had now answered more questions than there were on the SATs or that I had to listen to yet another person say that: ‘Someone Will Be Right with You’.

By the time it was all said and done I had spent about two hours in a place that was almost completely empty of patients, was basically told that they didn’t know what my problem was and that I should make an appointment to see my family doctor. As I walked back to my car I was really confused. Maybe I watch too much TV but I somehow envisioned this as being a place where people are running around looking very serious – as if there were some type of EMERGENCY going on. I guess art doesn’t always imitate life. If truth in advertising applied here I think they’d have to change the name from the ‘Emergency Room’ to the ‘Someone Will Be Right With You Room” or the ‘Casual Room’.
The bright side of the story is that all emergency response entities aren’t like this, and this is probably a very atypical experience. I have to be honest and admit that in the end I did feel a lot better when I left that place. That is until I got the bill.