Hello all-I found your site while doing a search for standard of care in the ER. I'm going to be the first to say, the only nursing experience I have is as a patient as I have just been accepted to a program. I will introduce myself more later, but currently typing this with one hand do to surgery yesterday (which is how I found this site)
Anyway, on Sunday I was getting ready to make dinner & handed my husband a sharp knife by handing it handle out. You can probably guess what happened next. I wanted to wait & see since I'm not one to head to the ER unless I think I need to go by medic. But this time, I knew the cut on my index finger was DEEP (arterial blood was squirting out). We have several major hospitals near us, we chose the closest because the bleeding was so heavy (soaked 3 bath towels in 15 mins)
So we arrive at the ER, lots of blood, taken immediately to a room, BP check and questioned by a few different people (a nurse and some others, not sure what they were, never saw them again). Nurse hands me a gauze pad and tells me to hold my hand over my head and keep the pressure on it. She goes over my medical history and then leaves. The clerk comes in to collect my $150 copay. About 20 mins have now passed with me spurting blood & everyone that comes into the room saying "wow, you're making a mess". 30 mins, doc comes in, pours saline on the cut and say "holy crap, we need a hand surgeon, I'm not touching that" and leaves, saying he will go page one. Now we've been there an hour, I've soaked my entire sheet, gown (they removed my shirt). I'm doing the best I can to keep my arm above my head and hold pressure, but I'm feeling sick, clammy and very dizzy. A radiology tech comes and when I get to the xray area, she tells me to take the pressure off and remove the gauze pad. I warn her I am bleeding a lot she says "I have to xray without the pad" so I remove it and blood immediately sprays all over the room. her clothes, etc. She gets upset, takes the xray while yelling at the other tech that "she made a huge mess, ugh I guess I will clean it up"
Then she wheels me back to the exam room. The ER is practically empty except for me, another guy who cut his hand and a teen with a sore throat, an ENORMOUS woman who wants pain meds because her knees & hips hurt and a bunch of toddlers crying and screaming (they are there with the "sick" people who bring the entire family) The nurse ONLY comes to check on me when my husband, who sees the large pile of bloody towels and then she finally says "I guess you want something for pain" to which I say "No, I want to stop bleeding!!". She sends in an aide who can only say "no, must keep pressure" and grabs my injured hand trying to twist it to put a new gauze bad, more blood squirts on HIM and he ends up scraping my leg with something in his pocket (leaving a 16cm cut on my thigh) and I yell in pain & he runs out of the room. Noone comes to check
Now we have been there for 3.5 hours and the bleeding has not stopped, even with pressure & holding it above my head (I can't do it forever I am getting weak). I feel like I'm going to pass out, I'm very thirsty and the nurse comes in with a percocet & a cup of water. My husband asks how much longer & what are we waiting on. She says "Oh, they're just working through the others (sore throat, hip/knee pain and other cut finger - they are treated first because they are there first, she says. He says "even with all of this bleeding?" and she shrugs, checks my BP again (which has dropped to 85/56 from 142/90 when I arrived) and leaves. My husband goes back out to the desk & is told they took the OTHER guy to surgery so it'll probably be 12+ hours longer wait for me. A physcian's assistant overhears and says "I'll sew her up but you need to have a surgeon come check her first" So I've gone from emergency, to ignored, to a dr afraid to sew me up because it's too deep to a PA saying she will do it.
My husband finds someone else who pages the surgeon, who leaves surgery to come check me. He asks how long I've been bleeding like that and everyone makes excuses. He VERY annoyed. He checks my cut & says "you've cut an artery, a bunch of nerves and the tendon, you have to have surgery but I'm in the middle of sewing the other guys thumb on, you should have been first!" and gives me a nerve block and instructs the PA how to put loose sutures in and tells me to be in his office at 8 the next morning (Monday), I'm immediately booked for surgery which has been done.
Is this the standard of care for an emergency? Should I have gone to urgent care instead? We went to the ER because it was 5 pm on Sunday and everyone else was closed. I thought bleeding like that IS an emergency, not a sore throat or something. I feel really traumatized. I was in HORRIBLE pain the entire 5 hours we were there, the surgeon said I lost A LOT of blood (the only way he knows is because I just had a CBC a week ago at a checkup and I guess he is able to figure it out from the blood he took from me?) He is SO upset that I wasn't given any pain med to take home, no IV, no blanket and wasn't kept warm with the blood loss, no antibiotics, nothing in the ER) The surgery took nearly 4 hours to repair because it was such a mess. I feel REALLY terrible and sudden lost my hearing in my left ear when I felt like I was fainting (and did lose conciousness for 2-3 mins until the PA came in and flicked me or something, it is all a nightmare to me.
I don't want to be a nurse if this is the standard of care (which I am pretty sure it is not, I have been in other ER's for bleeding kidney cyst and was cared for VERY well in the ER and as an inpatient, this was a different hospital, a foofy suburban hospital. I am still feeling a sense of shock over all that happend
