ER and more ER

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Tuesday morning I woke up with the worst pain I've ever had, and it was in my backside. I have hemmherroids and one had a blood clot in it. Probably one of the more embarrassing things you can go to the ER about, but it hurt so bad I went anyway. He didn't drain it, he said he had to refer me to a private doctors office for that but he gave me lidocaine cream and some Lortabs. I stayed in bed for three days with hot compresses and hurting.

This morning my husband woke me up at 8 with his knee killing him. He injured it playing football back in high school and it's given him some problems over the years but never like this. He was screaming with it, and actually crying - he doesn't cry and he usually doesn't show emotion or much response to pain so I knew this was something. They didn't see anything on xray, but this was only about an hour and a half after it started. They gave him some pain pills and a steroid shot and sent him home.

Just letting ya'll know where I been and what's going on.

I guess they did an okay job with the immediate triaging.

Please do remember that you can go back to the emergency room if things get worse. And a blood clot, in whatever part of the body, sounds like it's potentially pretty serious.

And I'm sorry both you guys are suffering from really different things.

They suck at triage. You wait your turn unless you came in by ambulance. And if he goes back he won't go there, I will take him to DCH which is the big hospital. The hospital we went to is our small county hospital. I think they have about 12 to 15 beds in the entire hospital part, and they have one doctor, one RN and one LPN working in the ER. Sometimes they just have a nurse practitioner instead of a dr. It's horrible. They think everybody is drug seeking when you come in in pain. Thats probably because they get a ton of drug seeking rednecks with back pain or headaches all the time. I'm very aware that lots of people go to the ER in hopes of getting drugs, but that doesn't mean that everybody who has pain without a visible injury or some sort of diagnosed illness is faking it. I hate going there, but he was screaming and it was close by.

As for my blood clot, I've had this before once when I was pregnant and they drained it. Thats what you are supposed to do. This guy told me to put compresses on it and let it pop on it's own, which it finally did this morning while I was at the hospital with my husband. It feels a lot better now that it did, but it's still bleeding down there. Both me and my husband ended up with the same dr and nurse. That big giant doctor who almost always refuses to give anything at all stronger than Naprosyn and that mean nurse who thinks everybody is faking it and nobody is ever sick.

That dr actually yelled at my husband in there. DH was holding his knee, crying tears streaming down his face, yelling "just cut it off, cut the goddamn thing off!" and the dr yelled "Stop being stupid! I'm not gonna cut your leg off and there is no need for profanity! Now calm down and I'll xray it for you and see whats going on!" The nurse asked if he has anxiety. I told her no, he's basically a vulcan and I've seen him cut his finger to the bone before, just wince, and joke with people while he's getting it sewed up, so if he's acting like this, something is really wrong in there. I told the dr the same thing, that this isn't how he normally is, so please fix it. I also said that if he was just wanting drugs he would be asking somebody else because we know they don't adequately treat pain there, everybody knows it.

It sounds like you did really well talking with the nurse and doctor on your husband's behalf.

I sometimes struggle with speaking up in real time. One thing which has helped me is making a conscious decision of turning down my internal censor so that the default setting is that it's okay to go ahead and say it, unless it really jumps out at me as inappropriate. This combined with certain conversational wildcards like a neutral 'okay' and a 'hi, how are your doing,' the matter of fact strength and optimism even if the person is not being helpful.

I think your husband's case demonstates how it's really valuable to have someone with you in an emergency room or hospital ready to advocate on your behalf.