On Monday, it was raining - again - and I had to get to work. Up to now, the scooter has been very stable on wet roads so I got a surprise when braking at a roundabout, the bike flipped and landed on top of my foot. Luckily scooters are light and I could lift the back end off my foot and get back on and go to work. It was going to be a long day... after I arrived I hobbled up the road to get painkillers but by 3pm I'd had enough and told the boss to get a replacement. The foot was hurting nicely and my left hand had swelled a lot and looked like I'd been punching doors.
I didn't immediately go for medical treatment because I always avoid our hospitals if possible. I got home, ate, fed the cats and went out to face the casualty (ER) process at 6pm
The sign outside the triage dept was still there:
Waiting is good, it means you are not dying. The person you should feel sorry for is the one that we rush to treat
Or something along those lines. By 7:10 I was triaged code yellow and told to go an open a file and take myself off to the trauma room. The filing clerks told me to fill in a form, even though I have a file at the hospital, and if I needed a pen, I should go outside and buy one... Luckily some kind soul at the door lent me hers. In the meantime, a bunch of gangsters in a group were swaggering through the waiting room to go and smoke outside and one with gold teeth, gold chains and large ugly rings on every finger decided to sprawl in the chair in front of the filing clerks window and eat his lollipop. I was fairly surprised that he moved when I asked him to. Filing done, off to the trauma unit.
Triage codes in the wall: Orange: waiting time ~10 minutes, Yellow: ~1h, Green: 1-4h
The trauma unit looked nightmarish, sick people in beds along the walls, all the chairs full and plenty of exhausted people on the benches and in wheelchairs all hooked up to saline bags. A sure sign that they were supposed to be admitted but there were no available beds in the hospital
The waiting room was dirty with stains on the floor that I preferred not to examine too closely.
probably a mix of Ringers lactate solution and blood
Around 8pm a rather harassed doctor told us that they were extremely busy, we should be seen within 4 hours and that she was sending a bunch of us for x-rays based on our triage forms. My hand got X-rayed and the night wore on. I took a look at the x-rays, couldn't see much and strongly considered leaving...
In the meantime some irate patients and relatives started fights and
were escorted out. Then a young man who was was wandering around aimlessly, started leaving trails of blood everywhere and collapsed.
Time for the doctors to start panicking and get him stitched up before he bled out. It took a while for the blood trails to be cleaned.
All patient dignity had vanished: patients were being treated in the beds along the walls in full view of everyone else, I heard someone falling out of bed in the Resus room, a woman threw up all over herself in the back row. It got cleaned eventually.
How did it all get so bad? There was a fire at the main hospital down the road 6 moths ago so a lot of patients were being diverted to this hospital and others and apparently, some nights are just mayhem.
Around midnight I asked the doctor whether there was in fact any chance of being seen and she said that it would be soon and by 12:30 I was told that I had fractured one or possibly two bones but didn't need surgery. However, I would need to wait to have a cast put on and was given strong painkillers.
Around 2:30 I saw the Orthopedic surgeon who told me that we'd have to wait for instructions from her supervisor, who was in surgery but should be done soon. I dozed off at that point and at 3:30 I got woken up to put the cast on.
such a tiny, annoying little fracture: @adamada, 1 HBD for your thoughts - is it one or two fractures?
I finally got out of there at 4am, the birds were already singing and got home to feed the poor cats and fall into bed.
It's clear that our public healthcare is on the verge of collapse, thanks to covid and corruption. The best part of this is that I have to go to the hand clinic in 3 weeks time.... maybe OT... I wanna run away or win the lottery and pay for private healthcare
