The following do not require a visit to the ER:
[ul]
[li]Your otherwise healthy school aged child has had a fever for the last 2 hours.[/li][li]You twisted your ankle but you can walk on it without difficulty despite not even attempting to treat the pain with over-the-counter products.[/li][li]You vomited once.[/li][li]Your Primary Care Provider has scheduled you for an MRI of your lumbar spine due to your chronic back pain but you don’t feel like waiting a week until the appointment.[/li][/ul]
Conversely, the following situations are true emergencies or have the potential to become emergencies without further warning and you should not wait hours, days, weeks or months before seeking medical attention:
[ul]
[li]Some portion of your body becomes paralyzed.[/li][li]Grandma fell and ever since then is unable to bend her leg and says that her hip hurts.[/li][li]You usually walk several miles a day but recently you can only walk a half a block before you’re so short of breath that you have to stop for a rest.[/li][li]The mass that has been growing on the side of your neck now makes it difficult for you to breathe and/or swallow.[/li][/ul]
Also, please note that an ambulance is not the same thing as a taxi. Thank you for your attention.
I don’t even work in the field, and I have to say THANK YOU!
I had an episode last weekend bad enough that I considered the ER I thought about what could the ER do for me. I didn’t need X-rays, painkillers or anything of the sort. I instead opted to call a friend, tell her to call in 2 hours and if I don’t answer, come get me. Then I went to sleep. When I woke up, the acuteness had passed.
When I told another friend about it, she freaked, wanting to know why I didn’t go to the ER. There was nothing, that I could think of, that the ER could do since I couldnt even pin point exactly what my issue was other than excessive fatigue and the shakes.
Then why are you saying “thank you”?
I went to the emergency room recently because I thought I was having a heart attack. I wasn’t. I don’t regret going.
Did you read the OP? I’d venture a guess that the poster would consider “I thought I was having a heart attack” to be a valid reason to go to the ER, even if it turned out you were wrong.
Joe
QFT.
Too many people ignore possible signs of heart trouble, and sadly, wake up dead. Including our recently lost poster, Gurujulp.
Granted, ERs are much abused for unnecessary things. I’ve worked enough hours in 'em in my lifetime to know that. And I support the OP’s point of not using ERs inappropriately.
But please don’t ignore important things!
Yes, I did read the OP.
I was responding to Marelt. I am still interested in why that poster felt it necessary to say, “Thank you!”
Because unnecessary use by non-emergency cases can delay care for actual emergencies. It also drives up costs, which indirectly affects us all.
Though ER peeps writing about various patients can be both educational and amusing! [be prepared to spend many hours if you read that thread from the beginning, it is up to 65 pages now]
In my experience in the emergency room, non-emergency cases get to sit around and gather dust while emergency treatment is dealt with.
Don’t you, of all people, dare cast a maligning glance on what drives up costs for taxpayers.
I went to the ER today.
I hate seeing doctors and almost never do. Usually I just wait whatever out, and I get better, and life goes on. But I caught a bug while visiting my sister at the hospital when she had her baby, and I saw her post this morning that he was 1 month old today. And it hit me–I’d been sick for a month. Solid headachey, coughy, sore and exhausted sick, and my lungs hurt.
So I have pneumonia. I feel slightly ridiculous, and rather Edwardian. But the ER folks were all very nice, and it was mercifully empty. My nurse told me the day before a holiday is always dead, and then the day after they come in in droves.
Oh lordy, that’s my life passing before my eyes as I read that.
Yeah, “I thought I was having a heart attack” clearly falls under the 2nd list, not the first. And I’ve had patients come in with chest pain, worried that they’re having a heart attack but still waited 2 days to come in.
I don’t know why anyone with access to any other medical care would go to the ER - it’s a completely miserable experience. The last time I was there it was because my son had put his teeth all the way through his bottom lip. We waited for seven hours to be seen by anyone other than the triage nurse, much of that time spent with him crying and drooling through the hole in his mouth. He ended up getting five stitches. If it hadn’t been late on a Saturday night, I would have tried to find an alternative like an urgent care. I have no idea what anyone else was there for, so I can’t judge them for our delay. But I try to give people the benefit of the doubt because they either can’t go somewhere else, or they’ve judged their situation to be dire enough to sit through the hell of the ER.
One theory on this is I think that some people only see their elderly relatives on holidays and are often shocked at how long their parent or grandpa or great aunt who lives alone has been living with, for example, a wound that isn’t healing or massive edema. It’s kinda sad.
I feel like I’ve been writing every other post about my stupid panic attacks, so I apologize for bringing 'em up yet again.
Since 2007 i’ve been having panic attacks that quickly led to panic disorder. Each time they present in ways that, to me, are almost indistinguishable from what I believe are heart attack symptoms. Tachycardia (100 - 130bpm), paresthesia (numbness/tingling) in my limbs and jaw, shortness of breath, sense of impending doom, etc. Went to a hospital the first time this happened in 2007 and went through the whole nine yards of exams: EKG obviously, CBC, echo, MRI of my legs and chest to rule out a blood clot, and so on. Did a second blood test after six hours (apparently due to women’s heart attack symptoms being more ‘subtle’ than men’s and presenting with certain markers, I think?). Findings: none. Probably a panic attack.
Since then I’ve grown more accustomed to the symptoms (and I’m now on anti-anxiety meds that do help) but I’ve still been to the ER about four times in the past four years. Each time because I just can’t shake the feeling that I’m about to die. Sometimes I can talk myself out of the attack, remind myself: “You’ve felt exactly these symptoms before, and all those times it was nothing; you’ve been to the cardiologist, had the stress test, got the O.K., take deep breaths, think of something else, yadda yadda.”
But once in a while those tricks don’t work and the symptoms last longer than a half-hour (actually all my panic attacks, if I don’t fight them off in the first five minutes, usually last for a couple of hours), even after popping a Xanax (which I only take in the throes of an actual attack, not regularly). Then I have to make the decision: go to the ER, or wait it out? The thought always occurs to me: what if this time these same symptoms reallyl are from a heart attack? So I go to the ER, and so far (knock wood) they’ve ruled out everything “bad” as they put it. Diagnosis: cardiac arrhythmia due to stress. Follow-up with psych. And every time there’s some new facet – last time it was a warmth/burning in my chest, which led to my calling 911 instead of taking a taxi. Last March it was a building pressure in my head like a balloon was being blown up inside my head. Still the same: they can’t find anything wrong with me except depression/anxiety/stress.
I end up feeling like a malingerer or a nutty hypochondriac for wasting the doctors/nurses’ time. They’re all nice and whenever I apologize they say “no, that’s what the ER is for, it’s best not to second guess, etc.” I still feel like a crazy person who’s wasting resources for something that’s basically a phantom. I’m like the girl who cried wolf.
Thing is, in that story, the wolf eventually shows up. That’s what scares me.
So I guess my question to the OP and Qadgop would be… With someone who suffers these same damn symptoms that (to me) seem right out of some “So You’re Having a Heart Attack!” pamphlet… Should I still go? When do I make that 911 call?
If you fall on ice, put your hand out to catch yourself, and now your elbow has bulges in places it didn’t before and the joint doesn’t work, go to the ER. As he’s driving me to the hospital, my husband was saying, “Are you SURE we need to go to the ER?”. Aaarrrrgghhh!
I said thank you because I believe people waste the time and resources of ERs way too often. Yes this drives up insurance and taxes, but it also just plain wasteful. I know people who go to ERs for part 1 of the OPs list and this can mean that triage nurses are having to deal with people who don’t need medical intervention or could be at a minute clinic sort of place.
…Seriously?
Why the uncalled for nastiness? Why do you care so much about why someone said thank you? Are you afraid he is going to deplete the world’s precious supply of nice words? Nobody said that “might be having a heart attack” is a bad reason to go to the ER, and, by extension, nobody is casting aspersions on your trip to the ER for what you thought was a heart attack. Calm down, Francis, and dial the defensive pettiness down a couple of notches.
love
yams!!
I have personally made use of the ER twice in my life that I know of, once at age five when I was diagnosed with asthma and just this year when a switch of medication saw me have an attack so bad I passed out from lack of oxygen and was taken there by others.
But I seriously get people saying all the time to go to the ER if I say I am feeling fatigued and mightbe coming down with a cold, or have some mild diarrhea or whatever. I mean think of the time wasted at least, do you want to feel like shit in the ER or the couch?
I agree, to some extent. Certainly, there are many medical issues that an urgent care facility is more appropriate for than an ER.
However, in my three years in St. Louis, I could not find an urgent care clinic that my insurance would cover.