Emergency Room or Urgent Care?

In My Humble Opinion
21

I assume the OP is by now either dead or asleep, so this is probably moot. However…

If you go to the ER, they’ll give you a $1,200 IV and park you in a hallway while they tend to the real sick people. And you’d better hope everything is out of your system or you’ll soon learn the fine art of crapping/puking your guts out in a nasty ER bathroom with your buttless gown garthered in one hand, IV pole clutched in the other. Which hand do you clean up with? Not the one with a needle in it.

Unless you have underlying medical conditions, you might as well crap yourself in the comfort of your own home.

22

Hi all. Just wanted to come back and give you an update.

I did end up going to an ER, because of some confusion over whether or not a place at the hospital was urgent care (Cigna was basically wrong when they said there was a department at the hospital that acted as an urgent care facility, and by that point, I was having trouble even walking around. Almost blacked out getting out of the car in fact). So I decided just to go to the ER since I was there and didn’t feel like hunting down another urgent care place. My wonderful boyfriend was doing all the driving and walking me around, making sure I didn’t fall over, etc.

I was running a fever of 100+, and my blood pressure was really wonky when I stood up, so they determined I was dehydrated and hooked me up to an IV for several hours to replenish my fluids. In the end, I’m glad I ended up going to the ER because it felt like I could have passed out at any time. (The weather in houston is pretty hot and humid nowadays so that probably added to my light-headedness).

Anyway, I’m home now and been sleeping the day away. Doctor’s orders were NO SOLID FOOD whatsoever, and I did get a perscription for anti-nausea. Luckily I haven’t thrown up again since I posted this morning, or shortly thereafter, but I’m still losing a lot of water due to loose stool (which calling it stool is generous, considering there’s not a speck of solid shit in there, literally… all water).

My boyfriend has been playing nurse and taking good care of me, making sure I drink a little water occaisionally (that’s the doctor’s orders, he said to avoid anything with sugar so gatorade or soda is out). I have no appetite but he also bought me some clear soup to try to eat when I feel up to it, but the doctor seemed to urge me not to eat anything today, which is fine with me because of the lack of appetite.

Anyhow, thanks all for the advice, everything seemed to work out in the end. I asked one of the nurses or orderlies or whatever she was who was doing most of the stuff with me if I was right to come to the ER, and she seemed to think I didn’t make a bad decision. She said anytime you’re feeling pretty dizzy or light headed the ER is not a bad choice.
Now… I just gotta wait for the bill. Ugh. Probably going to kill me! Anyone want to hazard a guess how much an IV treatment, a blood and a urine test at an ER is going to cost me? I had a 100 dollar co-pay with my insurance, so that’s all I payed today… but who knows what my ER deductible is and how much the bill is going to be…

ETA: Just looked up my insurance info, and it looks like I have a 300 yearly deductible, so I think the max I’ll owe is 300 bucks. That’s not too bad, assuming I’m understanding my coverage correctly.

23

Often there will also be a fee for using the ER in addition to the deductible, like $50 or $75 or so.

24

I sure hope you’re feeling better soon, Drew*. Did the hospital seem to think it was ‘just the flu’ or…? Either way it sucks; glad you have such a nice boyfriend to help take care of you, it really sounds like the pits. Feel better soon!

25

Glad you’re feeling better! Take it easy till you feel like yourself again.

My guess on the bill is: $1,475.00.

26

twitch Pet peeve - if someone in an ER told him it was “just the flu” they should have whatever medical license they hold revoked.

The flu is the influenza virus, which can cause nausea and vomiting, but those symptoms are generally far more pronounced in children. Influenza is usually characterized by fever, body aches, congestion and cough, and fatigue. It is caused by the influenza virus, and most commonly spread by either inhaling aerosols produced by an infected individual sneezing/coughing, or hand-to-mucous-membrane contact.

Symptoms like the OP had come from gastroenteritis (an irritation of the gastrointestinal tract). This was most likely caused by one of a few viruses or bacteria - none of which are the influenza virus. It was most likely caused either by consumption of contaminated food (cross-contamination of raw produce, improperly cooked meat), or via the fecal-oral route (and that’s why you always wash your hands well after using the bathroom).

There is no such thing as “stomach flu”.

Glad you’re feeling better, OP!

27

Sigh… you are right in that, until influenza and rotavirus decide to start a family, there is no such thing as an influenza virus that focuses on the GI tract, but I would argue that “stomach flu,” as the layman’s term for “gastroenteritis,” certainly exists. If I told a friend I had to cancel plans due to a bout of stomach flu, they would know exactly what I meant, but if I blamed my absence on gastroenteritis, people would wonder what exactly I had, and if one of the symptoms was being overly pedantic.

love
yams!!

28

Yes, the printout on gastroenteritis said it was commonly known as stomach flu, and that’s what the doctor diagnosed me with.

I’m feeling almost back up to 100% tonight, to all of you who may be concerned!

After doing more research on my insurance, it looks like the most I will pay will be 300 dollars… I am very fortunate to have good insurance supplied by my employer. I feel so bad for people who have to go to the ER for something actually very serious, and don’t have insurance or very good insurance. :frowning:

29

Most facial lacs do not require a plastics consult.

30

The urgent care centers I have worked in wouldn’t touch a facial laceration, and would send those patients on to a hospital for suture.

31

My local urgent care was happy to stitch up my son’s face when he barely failed at putting his eye out with a bungee cord. I don’t think plastic surgery was ever even discussed. Years later, he still has a little scar and only two-thirds of an eyebrow. (I always instruct him to tell the girls that one of the ninjas just managed to slip past his guard before he finished them off.)

OTOH, when I dislocated my pinky finger at the second knuckle, another location of the same chain wouldn’t help me & sent me to the ER. The story was I needed X-rays to verify it wasn’t broken, and they had no X-ray machine. I was pretty sure it would have hurt more if it was broken, but that doesn’t qualify as a diagnosis :frowning: I spent nearly four hours at the hospital in the middle of the night just verifying that it wasn’t broken. Actual treatment took about five seconds. (Passing MD walking by: “Want me to reduce that for you?” “Um, sure …” YANK. I think that must have been Dr. Hank from Royal Pains.)

32

Usually done by the ER doc without a plastics consult.

33

You are so lucky that flu is all it was. I spent a day hugging (literally, yes literally) the toilet three times last year. First time, went to ER, had CAT scans, MRI, end result: no more gall bladder.

Second time, ER, admitted, held for a few days CAT scanned again, rehydrated, flooded with potassium, released.

Third time I went to urgent care instead (I had called ahead and asked if they give rehydrating IVs and meds for nausea, which they said they did). But hey decided my heart rate and blood pressure were “stroke out” high and sent me in an ambulance to the ER where I was admitted yet again, tested, and released after a few days.

When you’re dry heaving into a bag in the ER waiting room they sure triage you pretty fast. When they discover your BP is 180 over something, you get the special wristband that lets you out of the waiting room and into the ER proper. Where they somehow have cameras that can see and hear you, I learned. I spent 10 hours in that ER room before getting a real bed.

Anyway, glad you’re better and that they were able to diagnose you. :slight_smile:

(And boy howdy do I know what it’s like to go to the bathroom with an IV and heart monitor attached to your body. They had to replace my IV 3 times; I looked like Bane.

34

As a matter of policy, I tell people that if they can’t keep anything solid down for more than three days, or can’t keep any liquids down for more than 12 hours, they should seriously think about the ER. I developed this policy after acquiring a roommate who had a tendency to not tell anyone when she was really sick, and not go to a doctor for anything short of rapid exsanguination – and even then she’d probably wait a while to see if maybe she’d get better. I discovered this idiocy one day when I came home from the night shift when she was getting ready for her morning shift, and watched her conk out and have what later turned out to be a dehydration-induced blackout and syncopal seizure right in front of me. Twice.

After the first one, I took her shoes away from her and called her out sick from work. (They weren’t supposed to let me do that, but such policies tend to get bent when you tell them, “You can talk to her yourself if you want, but she’s still lying on the bathroom floor.”) After the second one, I told her she could put on some pants, get her purse, and call someone for a ride to the ER, or I would just wait until she did it a third time and call 911 while she was out and couldn’t stop me.

It turns out that if you tell the desk nurse that your roommate is very ill, not keeping anything down, and passing out and seizing on the floor, they come out to the parking lot with a gurney to get you. We did not stop in the waiting room. I did her intake for her. Which was good, because she also wanted to lie to the doctor about some of her chronic medical problems and whether there was a non-zero chance she was pregnant.

The moral of this story is that severe dehydration is very easy to fix when you’re in the ER where they have doctors and IVs, but that the aforementioned ER people take it very seriously, because it can in fact kill you if you let it go on too long.

35

Not a lot to add, except: Yesterday, I went to an “Urgent Care” facility. Something tells me that they weren’t really equipped for anything urgent. More like, a Dr’s. office with a sign that said “Urgent Care.” i.e., if you think you need something that a Dr.s office won’t give you, don’t bother with the UC.

36

Urgent Care varies. Varies A LOT. Mine is just a couple of docs who only take walk-ins, but they are Board Certified in Emergency medicine and they do IV hydration and X-rays on site (which a lot of the posters on this thread have said theirs doesn’t do).

But the larger point is, many people don’t have a regular doctor, or can’t get to their regular doctor when they are vomiting uncontrollably at 1am on Memorial Day. Your local office may be no more than a doctor who happens to be open till midnigh, but that’s good enough for an awful lot of low-priority situations that might otherwise end up with you cooling your heels in the ER for 12 hours or so.

37

Just got the information from the insurance company. I will only pay 300 to the hospital. The hospital billed for about $3,300, the insurance payed about $1,300.

Overall I’d say it was worth it.

38

Wow, I’ll say! It can’t hurt (if you can pay it all at once) to call them up w/ your credit card # and ask for a cash discount if you pay the full amount right now.

39

I hade gotten bronchitis as a teenager, and it was the middle of summer in Texas, everything I tried to drink or eat was painful to my throat and I really had no appetite. It was a Sunday so my mom thought she would take me the the urgent care clinic. After waiting several hours to be seen, the dr finally saw me and decided that yes I did have bronchitis so he wrote an Rx and gave me a steroid shot and that was it.

Well as my mom was at the payment desk, I had walked out to the foyer of the clinic and was just waiting for her…the next thing I know I wake up and there are EMTs surrounding me. I was so severely dehydrated that I had collapsed and hit my head on the marble floor. So the clinic had called 911 to bring the EMTs with the ambulance. I spent 8 hours in ICU at the hospital ER they took me to. After I was moved out of the ICU to a room, I remained in the hospital for 4 days.

A decent medical professional should be able to see signs and symptoms of dehydration. In my personal opinion if you are feeling weak, and are dealing with dehydration, don’t chance it at the urgent care. They don’t administer IV fluids, and may dismiss the severity of your situation, or may end up directing you to the ER in the end anyways since they can’t administer fluids… Dehydration is serious business when it comes to your health. Don’t chance it.

40

It’s been three years – I think he’s okay now.