On Thursday, I was having chest pains and trouble breathing. I called my family doctor, but couldn’t get an appointment until the next day. So, I left work and went to emergency, because it was scaring the hell out of me.
I walked into the emergency ward at 1:20. The triage nurse took down my symptoms, and within about 20 minutes they had me hooked up to an EKG, a blood pressure monitor, and an oxygen intake monitor. After about 10-15 minutes on that, I was sent back into the waiting room and told that I would see a doctor as soon as possible.
The hours ticked by. I have never before been in emerg for longer than two hours. As I watched the TV shows begin and end, the hours roll by on the clock, and other people coming and going, I could not believe the amount of time that was passing by. The sun set, the ambulances came and went, hospital security changed shifts, and still I and others continued to sit and wait. We could not leave the waiting room for food - nurses warned us that if our name was called and we were not there, we would go back to square one and redo our intake process. I was fortunate in that my husband stopped by with a sandwich on his way home from work. He had met me there on my arriving, but I told him to leave after hearing that the wait could be several hours.
At 11:15 pm, almost ten hours after my arrival, I was finally called in to see a doctor. The charge nurse then told me that both my EKG and oxygen intake tests showed perfectly normal results. They ran those two same tests again during the half hour that I waited to see the actual doctor. He told me that he really didn’t know what was causing the pains, that while I felt as though my breathing was troubled, the oxygen flow showed that it was not, and that I could go.
It appears the entire episode was brought on by stress (wow, big shocker there :rolleyes: ). But here’s the thing. First, eleven hours to find that out? How can the government claim all of these improvements to the health care system, and yet have people in an emergency ward waiting room for ten hours? I asked the triage nurse about the wait time - she told me that while it was a bit busier than usual, six-eight hour waits are the norm. Our city used to have four emergency wards. Two of these have been closed, and the government claims that we don’t need them. Second, why couldn’t someone have told me that the first tests were normal? Had I known they were normal, I would have gone home at that point and seen my family doctor the next day (I did see him).
FYI, as I said, it was all stress. I’m back on anti-anxiety medication for the time being.