My boy came bouncing out of his doctor’s office Tuesday, happy and healed. It took a while – not the fixing, but the waiting.
We’ve all read about emergency rooms being overloaded, in part because an ER is often the last hope of people without insurance or a primary care doctor.
Providence Everett Medical Center’s emergency department had 97,279 patient visits in 2003 at its Colby and Pacific campuses, said Julie Zarn, emergency department clinical director.
It’s the state’s second busiest, ahead of Harborview Medical Center in Seattle and right behind Southwest Washington Medical Center in Vancouver.
You can read about the high percentage of people in Snohomish County with Medicare, Medicaid or no insurance; the low reimbursement rates for these programs; the high cost of malpractice insurance; and the small number of family practitioners here.
But until you come through those emergency room doors, you may have no clue what those numbers mean.
Ah, but I have a bouncing boy. My 5-year-old went flying off my bed two weeks ago and landed, head-first, against the sharp point of a drawer. It looked bad, bloody bad. I was more afraid than he was.
I put pressure on it with a towel soaked in cold water, and kept folding that towel to get a clean surface.
Providence Everett’s Colby campus is just blocks from my house. At 8:45 on a summer weeknight, the waiting room was packed. A triage nurse peeked at what would later be diagnosed as a “simple laceration of the scalp.”
My guy went from scared to bored. While I held the towel to his head, he fidgeted, ate Skittles and finally went to sleep. Another boy had a cut on the arm. One man’s ankle hurt too much to walk. At close to midnight, a man left, complaining he’d wait no more.
About 12:15 a.m., our patience was rewarded with wonderful, unhurried care. A physician assistant – it says Jonathan Maher on the discharge papers – nicely explained everything to my scared son.
They cleaned his head, numbed it with topical anaesthetic, and got out the staple gun. Ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk, they put three staples in the top of his head while he lay on his stomach gripping my hand.
By 1:30 a.m., he was home asleep. On Tuesday, as the staples came out, I wondered whether the Colby campus had been the right choice.
“Colby is our acute care campus,” said Cheri Russum, the hospital’s spokeswoman. “About 38 ambulances come through that back door every day. People are in circumstances needing immediate care, heart attacks or car accidents.”
Less severe injuries may be seen more quickly at the Pacific campus, Russum said. “It’s a shorter wait than Colby by about an hour,” Zarn said.
Other options are walk-in clinics and the new Providence Everett Health Care Clinic on N. Broadway.
My son picked a peak time to fall off the bed. In summer, there are cuts and bruises. In winter, it’s flu.
“And all the time, everything else, accidents to the end stages of liver disease,” Zarn said. “Length of stay is something we’re always working on.”
The Emergency Treatment and Labor Act requires emergency rooms to treat all patients, regardless of ability to pay, Russum said.
Really, would we want it any other way?
Excuse me a second – “Hey buddy, off the bed!”
Columnist Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlsteinjulie@heraldnet.com.
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