A Visit to the ER
I have a little beef I’d like to take up with all of the pediatricians offices and hospitals out there. No, its not about the wait times, its not about the toys that seem to crawl with germs, its not about why you would put the fun mural and clown mirror on the ‘sick’ side of the waiting room leaving my healthy child there for a developmental check up to run over there and hang out. Pure craziness.
My beef is this. Why oh why must you keep your supplies drawers in your examining rooms unlocked?! We had a trip to the ER yesterday afternoon. My daughter has been ‘walking’ for a little over 6 weeks now. I say walking but it really should be called stumbling, frankly I’m a little concerned. She climbs like a monkey on anything and everything but she’s clumsy as all. Yes, she’s only 14 months old (today actually, yay!) so she’s developing her coordination and balance and it takes time, but I’ve never seen someone trip and fall so often. I had to remove the chairs from our little table and chair set because she wouldn’t stop climbing up on the table. I’ve taken away anything that she could use as a ladder, and still she manages to trip over a bag and hit her nose on the side of a table yesterday. Poor little thing. I constantly have one hand hovering near her to sweep her up, as I did yesterday but it didn’t help. I called our pediatrician’s office and they said we needed to go to the ER because she hit the bridge of her nose which apparently is the worst spot. So I packed up the kids just as they should have been going down for a nap and we trekked over to the ER. This is when I love living in a city, it took all of 5 minutes to get there, including a return back to the house to put the umbrella stroller in the trunk.
So there we are, Friday afternoon sitting in the ER with people hacking up a lung on either side of us, kids screaming, my kids playing with the germy toys after rejecting the ones that I brought from home. After 2 hours we get called into the examining room where we are left to our own devices.
The room is typical, eight feet by eight feet. It has an examining table that has 3 drawers below it, all of which have a lock on them, but of course they are all unlocked. There are biohazard bags, Kleenex boxes, boxes of tongue depressors, boxes of Q-tips, the list goes on. You know what also surprised me? There was an electrical outlet right at their eye level that wasn’t covered. So of course they go to try and stick their fingers in it. I always think of doctors and nurses telling us how to keep our kids safe and outlet covers is one of the big ones, why don’t they use them in hospitals? It is a Children’s hospital after all. Anyhow, I digress. On the other side of the room is a sink with 4 more unlocked drawers and cupboards under it with more fun things to play with: urine cups, something else in a bag, plastic gowns, change table pads. I mean seriously, come on. I felt like I was playing whack-a-mole going back and forth asking them to take the urine cup out of their mouth, put it back in the drawer and close it. I think I said put it back and close the drawer 500 times before the doctor came in. Next time I think I might just let them wreak havoc on the room and suggest to the doctor that those doors should be locked. Better yet, maybe I’ll contact the hospital directly because there’s no sense having a beef, if the people you have a beef with don’t know about it.
In the end, my daughter was fine. They said she might wake up today with two black eyes, but she didn’t. All is good. Next investment is a padded room and a helmet for my daughter.
