foshriizzle:

vastderp:

jumpingjacktrash:

naamahdarling:

chasing-apricity:

silfreya:

dec19ker:

a-real-archaeopteryx:

I mean it. You’re getting the attention you think you want, all eyes on you. Except ours.
“Isn’t there anything you can do?” Your fellow waiters ask us, concerned. Behind the triage window, you can’t hear our teeth grinding.
You’re in pain, i understand that. This might even be the worst pain you’ve ever felt.
But you’re probably not dying.

Dying isn’t loud.
A patient having a heart attack does not scream and thrash and gasp for air. It’s a whisper, a tightness, with slow flexing fingers.
A stroke happens in a fraction of an instant, and never makes any sound. More whispers, halves of sentences and muscles that don’t quite match up anymore, a puppet with a few of the strings cut. Alarmed and wandering eyes, maybe, but never yelling.
Or the more common killers, infections that shut down organs or the pipes of blood that sever. Cardiac or respiratory failure. If a person can talk they are, in fact, breathing just fine.

Remember this, the next time you come to an emergency department. Remember this when you’re sitting in the waiting room, while a sleepy-looking person in a wheelchair is whisked away without a word.

I’ve been on both sides of the fence on this one. Working in the ER and being a patient. And the fact of the matter is no one can really tell how much pain you feel. One day I got brought into the ER in an ambulance with abdominal pain. I’m an EMT mind you, I hate going to the ER unless I have to. Felt like something from the Aliens movies was trying to get out of my stomach. Got assessed in triage and the pain passed. And then It came back with a vengence. Honest to God 10 out of 10. And I tried to be civil and ask the nurses if I could get moved back just so I could get something for the pain. I got the eye roll, the looks of disbelief, and told to wait. I tried walking away, my knees gave out and I landed on all fours. In the ER. And I screamed. It was the worst pain ever. They tried to put me back in a wheelchair. The movement made the pain worse. It wasn’t until the charge nurse said that I was making a scene that they took me back to an exam room. I sat there for 5 minutes waiting on my nurse. It got hard to breath. It took another 5 minutes for them to get me pain killers and an x-ray. My entire upper abdomen from my diaphragm to my belly button was full of air. My stomach had ruptured and was leaking into all of my abdomen. I was rushed to emergency abdominal surgery and was going into shock when I made it to the OR. 5 more minutes and I would have been dead. I tried to “suffer in silence and with dignity”. It almost got me killed.
You don’t get to decide if people are in pain or not just by looking at them. You’re human. Not a CT scanner.

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I rear ended a car at 16 and slammed on breaks & ended up shattering EVERY bone in my right foot & snapping my ankle in half. Later, the specialists said it was the worst foot break they have ever seen. When the ambulance dropped me off at the hospital, strapped to a stretcher, they wheeled me into the break room and left me there for 30 minutes.

They left a child in the nurses break room for 30 minutes with no explanation. Just wheeled me in there and left me crying my eyes out surrounded by people playing angry birds on their phones.

When I finally saw a nurse she gave me TYLENOL and told me to go home with my mom because my foot was “a little swollen”. They wrapped it in gauze. They were mad because I was making so much noise but my foot literally felt like it was on fire.

YOU CANNOT DECIDE HOW MUCH PAIN SOMEONE IS IN!!!!

Seriously, it’s shitty shitty shitty attitudes like OP’s that make me terrified of ever having to go to the ER.

Y’all have a hard job, I know and appreciate that, but y’all can also be jaded, heartless sons of bitches and it’s seriously ill and suffering patients who pick up the tab on that.

i have lifelong psychological trauma from being left waiting four hours with unbearable abdominal pain when i was eleven or so.

four hours.

someone prodded at my stomach and decided that since the pain wasn’t in the right place to be a ruptured appendix, it was just gas. after that, the only nurses who even came near me only came to tell me to be quiet.

my parents begged for someone, anyone, to listen – he never cries, they said, he never whines, i’ve never heard him make this noise before, something is really really wrong! this kid fell out of a tree and broke his collarbone and got up laughing! when he stepped on broken glass he just said ‘uh i guess you better fetch a towel’! jesse does not scream, please someone at least try to find out what’s wrong, isn’t this a hospital?

all anyone said was, kids make such a fuss. stop being dramatic.

meanwhile, i was entering an altered state from the unrelenting pain, hallucinating and giggling through my sobs, having mini blackouts. i bit clean through a paperback book before someone finally came around to take me to x-ray “though i’m sure we won’t find anything.” the x-ray technician snapped “you don’t need that” and snatched my teddy bear, tossing it on a counter, where it would’ve been left behind if my mother hadn’t noticed me coming out of the room without it (they didn’t let her come in with me) and gone charging in to get it.

more waiting, because x-rays took time to develop back then. more contempt and cold shoulders, and me wondering if i could maybe walk just enough to get out to the highway and dive in front of a semi, because hell cannot be any worse than this.

and then suddenly, here’s a doctor who is in a huge hurry and we are going to give me a great big enema right fucking now because the x-ray found a bowel obstruction as hard as stone and my intestines are going to rupture any second! hurry hurry, don’t you know how high the fatality rate is for sepsis from a ruptured bowel? terrified eleven year old, dehydrated and seeing double and too weak to stand, gets what feels like a garden hose full of lava shoved up his butt, and then they point me at a toilet and leave me there.

result: child on the floor, erupting from both ends. nurse’s reaction: anger and disgust.

pretty much everything from the x-ray on, i remember as if i was watching myself on tv. by the time they left me in the bathroom i wasn’t crying anymore. i was just sort of… nearby, while things happened to my body. i wondered if my bowel was still in danger of rupturing, but i couldn’t find it in me to care.

i was finally quiet.

maybe at that point OP would’ve condescended to notice me.

Folk wisdom about who needs the real help works and sounds good ninety percent of the time but when psychiatric pts die on the floor in your waiting rooms from a fatal case of non standard presentation complicated by acute jaded power trip it’s still malpractice

Ps head injuries for sure never cause a person to be altered and act like nothing serious is going on

op, it’s attitudes like yours in the world of medicine that need changing, not how our patients “should” present when they come to us for help.