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.Reblog for this comment
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.
OP is heartless.
People’s pain tolerances are different. Everyone deserves to be treated with dignity.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/10/emergency-room-wait-times-sexism/410515/
That article is specific to how female pain is minimized (usually as hysteria). It’s even worse if you’re a WOC.
Look at what happened to Serena Williams. Greatest tennis player of all time, nearly dies in childbirth because doctors don’t want to listen to her that something is not right. Probably the only reason she is alive is because she is who she is.
There are some people who are in such chronic habitual pain that their reference point for pain doesn’t even make sense to someone not in their condition. Their resigned “I don’t know…five?” Could be someone else’s screaming 10.
Also thinking of my SIL’s father who frankly was killed by malpractice. Poor man was in screaming pain when they ignored protocol to change his catheter and they said he was faking it. He went septic because they fucked it up.
Reading the stories on this post is horrifically sad. Shame on the original poster. SHAME. Get a different fucking job.
If you go to the ER, cry and scream as loud as you need to. If anything, it might make the staff like OP see to you faster just to get you to shut up.
The only reason I didn’t permanently lose my sight is because I made a scene.
Imagine little 15 years old me, who never needed glasses or had any type of problem with their sight, suddently starting to get random headaches, pain behind their right eye, and see blurry. I went to the ER the first time when I could hardly see from said eye, and after two hours a nurse sent me back home saying that it was “just stress” and to “sleep it off”.
A week later my parents rushed me to the ER because the pain was so unbearable that I had bursted out crying during class. They explained the situation to a nurse and guess what? I was left waiting for another two hours.
I had no idea what was happening. I felt like my head was exploding, and at that point I could only see white from my right eye. After those two hours, which I spent sitting quietly with tears running down my face because the nurse had told me not to disturb the other people waiting, I noticed that my vision was going completely white.
And I freaked out.
I started wailing, sobbing my eyes out and screaming “I can’t see! I CAN’T SEE!!” while pressing the heels of both hands against my eyes because that was the only thing that made the pressure behind them more bearable.
That seemed to catch the nurses’ attention: a 15 years old kid in full blown panic attack screaming bloody murder because they had gone completely blind.
After that I was visited pretty quickly, and ended up spending almost a month in the neurology department because the optic nerve of my right eye had completely shut down. The doctor that followed me was horrified when she found out that I had spent a week walking around while my eye was in that condition. Had I been hospitalized a week before a lot of problems could have been prevented.
End result? I managed to get my vision back (though they never figured out what exactly caused the loss), but my optic nerve is permanently damaged and the tiniest stress makes my vision go blurry. I also have problems with my color perception and still get random pain.
So yes, cry and scream as loud as you need to. Force them to notice you.
I have seen a total of 7 people over the course of my life die in a waiting room of the ER.
Right in front of me.
Often with me demanding that nurses or doctors do something.
Some were quiet. Some were loud. But ALL of them…. were human beings who deserved and needed help and did not get it.
I was misdiagnosed from May 2010 to the end of September 2010 with a “pulled muscle” in my back. No matter how many times I went, not matter how I presented, the doctors refused to do more than an x-ray before writing off my pain.
As the months went on I couldn’t sleep, could hardly move. I lost feeling in my leg, my feet and toes. I couldn’t eat, I would just sit and cry endlessly, unable to find relief. And as soon as my body began to adjust to the level of pain, the pain got worse.
But visit after visit, I was dismissed.
And it not only affected my health and quality of living, but my ability to work and function…. and then it affected my relationships. My friends didn’t understand why I wasn’t working. I was told to “work through the pain.”
Because if the doctor’s said it wasn’t that bad, no one was going to believe me when I said it was unbearable.
And I worked through the pain, in 10-12 hour shifts at a convenience store, hauling boxes and standing for hours, no lunches…
Until finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. It came to pass that finally, after months of horrendous agony, I hadn’t gone to the bathroom in over a week. I couldn’t. The pain was too severe.
And so I went. And I lied. Until this point I’d told them the reality— I woke up one morning, and my back was in pain. Since there was no accident that caused it, they wouldn’t look further. But this time I lied- I told them I tripped over my cat.
Because I was in so much pain, I couldn’t think of a better lie. And I was crying, but quiet… for 10 hours, waiting in the front of the ER to be seen.
They took me back, and were discussing just an x-ray AGAIN and then I snapped. I lost my mind, I wailed, I dropped, I couldn’t move. I shrieked the pain of nearly half a year so loudly they finally sedated me, and put me in a chair in the back area to await a ct scan.
Another 5 hours later (but at least with really good pain meds finally, to keep me quiet) I went for the CT scan, and lo and behold… a herniated disk in my lower lumbar, pressed so hard on my spinal cord, the doctors didn’t understand how I had walked into the ER, much less walked to multiple bus stops and rode multiple buses to get there.
I was scheduled for emergency surgery…. that I still had to wait another 9 hours for.
Because no one would listen, aside from my mom. I had people I loved treating me like dirt for being unable to pay bills, all on the word of doctors who didn’t do their jobs.
So you can go to hell OP.
My brother was born very very sick. He’s a miracle baby because 33 years ago premies with serious medical conditions usually didn’t last long.
We learned, hard and fucking fast, that doctors are assholes who will ignore you unless you *make* yourself be heard.
If you go to the hospital remember that the doctors and nurses are their for you. Make a fuss, make them listen, demand another doctor or another nurse if the one you’re seeing isnt listening.
Be hard. Be mean if you have to be because sometimes that’s the only way you can get through to the person in the white coat who treats you like you’re bothering them for trying to get help when you’re in pain.
fuck op
I was in the ER screaming in pain when the nurse comes and tells me to be quiet.
I’m sitting in a wheel chair unable to move or talk because the pain is so intense
And when I started vomiting and having things come out the other side against my will they got annoyed and gave me the special wheel chair and a pail
Suddenly I was screaming and throwing up blood because they gave me nothing for nausea and then I was seen horribly dehydrated and they had me on IVS finally because the reason I was so weak was because I had no water in my system and it was just pushing out bile.
My cords were strained and ripped in my throat and when the doctor came in he said it was so serious and I was instantly tested for an intestinal disease
And guess what
It got worse because the last time I went they told me to go home
Fuck op
Thinking like that is why I wasn’t seen for almost seven hours and had my vocals ripped because of how much strain was put on them.
I honestly hope all the medical professionals who have added shitty, condescending, ignorant, classist/ableist, gaslight-y comments to this post wind up with kidney stones, appendicitis, three herniated discs, and a blinding migraine, all at the same time, go to the ER, and get sent home for being dramatic and just trying to get drugs.
I’d add norovirus just because they deserve to be shitting themselves at the same time, but that at least produces very obvious “this person is not faking” symptoms.
fun fact: the literal definition of a 9 and 10 on the pain scale is inability to move and screaming,,,,, hm,,,,,
So, I had this long story typed out…then my phone died. So, none of it stayed and this is the short version. I have an extremely high pain tolerance, and I’ve been to spraining things on the regular since kindergarten. I tore a ligament in my right arm when I was in 3rd or 4th grade. Went to the ER, they brushed it off as a sprain, got a brace and after a week or two when the swelling was more or less the same and the pain had barely gone down, we went back. My mom pestered them until they took a closer look and realized, “Hey, this is worse than we thought.” I got the right thing to make my arm useable again. But the doctor told me that she was surprised that my pain level wasn’t higher. It was then that I learned that a three to me is around a five to others. We now go to the ER based on bruising and swelling instead of pain. But, when it really hurts, we know something isn’t right.
The louder you are in the ER waiting room, the more the staff is convinced that you are not having an emergency.
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