Just a quick recap of my adventures last Wednesday night.
I was clipping a toenail I tore. Silly, I didn’t want to tear it because I didn’t want it to bleed all over. So instead, I clipped it. And the toe next to it, so THAT bled all over. For hours. The second I let up any pressure at all, it would resume gushing.
First stop: Urgent Care. Oh, they don’t open til 7:30. Hmm, do I want to sit in their parking lot and bleed for another 3 hours? Probably not. In retrospect, I should have. Or I should have just gone home and risked bleeding to death, but at least I have hydrogen peroxide and bacitracin and ibuprofen here.
So I decide, maybe I’ll try Samaritan’s ER. Yes, their reputation has sunk considerably. My dad died there, and they were already sinking then (but when I was a kid, no lie, they were a fairly good hospital). I mean, ERs do a triage thing, right? They aren’t going to keep me in the waiting room if I got a booboo that won’t stop bleeding, right?
Right. They’ll bring me into an examining room and let me friggin’ bleed out there. The girl told me 3 or 4 times she’d be back for the tetanus shot and to take my blood pressure. She then disappeared for an hour. Let it be known, eventually they did ram the needle in my arm, but no one ever took my blood pressure.
Doc comes in, and does what the nurse did: lift off my bloody, yucky gauze, say “ooh, its still oozing”, and stick the gauze back on. And leave again.
This entire time, mind you, a kid across the hall is getting loads of attention because she cut her hand punching out a window at school. Yes, I even heard her call her friend and brag about it.
Finally the doctor returns. Can’t even do a single stitch; it’s too small. But in this shining new millenium, do you think they’d have Nuskin or something similar? Maybe a styptic pencil? It is a hospital, after all. No. They slap some antibiotic creme on it and a bandaid. Not even gauze. A bandaid. Scroll up; I reiterate, I should have just risked bleeding to death on my own couch. And that was $100! My copay DOUBLED. For a squirt from a $4 tube of creme and a 25 cent bandaid.
Better to bleed out waiting for Urgent Care. That’s only $20, and I could have swung home and grabbed my own bacitracin.
azbaelus 