Actually, I also have a lot of friends who work at that hospital. They were seen in a UMC urgent care, when she was UNABLE to urinate she was told to go to the UMC ED which she did. She did not know that she was pregnant, and so had not received prenatal care. Despite being in enough pain that witnesses in the waiting room asked for her to be seen, she was not seen. I have sat in that very waiting room with an older person with a possible stroke for no less than 12 hours (back when I was REALLY new to town and it was the only hospital I knew of...). While I realize that if symptoms have occurred for too long there's not much they can do, that is excessive. There are a number of wrong things that happened. And yes there is culpability on the part of the patient. I can't say if I would have called an ambulance, it depends on how much pain I was in. Having miscarried at that approximate number of weeks I can say for me the pain built. As far as the fact that it could have been a spontaneous abortion anyway and maybe that's all they would have done for her? Having been there more than once, including helping deliver the fetal demise of patients while in school - JUST STOP IT! If I ever get that callous about a PATIENT please tell me to stop being a nurse! And that is what it comes down to. We may not know everything about how it was handled, and we don't know everything about the patient, but for a woman who sought care to go through that ordeal alone is a tragedy. This only happened a couple of weeks ago. This was a woman, a patient, and a family that went through something awful. We don't have to be happy about the legal aspects and ramifications thereof, but must we immediately be suspicious of something that was an awful thing to happen to someone? Okay, now, I'm stepping off of my soapbox.
