Maybe my experience this past week wasn't typical, but regardless, I don't see how they can call themselves an emergency room when they wheel people out like this.
Last Friday I had my tonsils and adenoids removed at Ambulatory Surgery Center Of Spartanburg. I was released and back at home by early evening (drugged to hell). In the afternoon, while I was sleeping off the morphine, I woke up choking on blood. My family immediately rushed me to the closest emergency room (as my post-op instructions had stated), which happens to be Upstate Carolina Medical Center. By the time we arrived at UCMC, I had spat out enough blood to completely cover the inside of a plastic grocery bag I was carrying with me (not to mention how much I had swallowed), and the bag was actually starting to fill in the bottom. The ER people, obviously seeing me as very distraught and in a dangerous condition, got me back to a room within a few minutes.
This is where the really interesting part begins. The ER doctor comes in, takes a quick look in the back of my throat, and says he will return in a minute. A few minutes later, a nurse brings me a glass of ice-water (with a straw), and tells me the doctor wants me to drink it. So, I send my wife out to find this doctor and explain to him that I can feel blood squirting into my throat, and that I don't think ice-water is the cure... She comes back and tells me that the doctor has called my surgeon from earlier in the day, and that he will be with me in a minute. We sit there, waiting, for nearly half an hour (in the meantime, I do somehow drink the glass of water). He finally comes back, and says that he told my surgeon that I was bleeding, and that my surgeon says unless it gets worse to just go home and rest.
Okay... Go home and rest... Good advice...
So, I am released from UCMC, with blood pouring down my chin. On the way home, my wife (on my insistence) called my surgeon's after-hours number, and tells him what is going on. My surgeon told her that the dumb@ss at Gaffney told him I wasn't bleeding anymore! At this point, I was actually bleeding worse!
So my surgeon tells me to get myself to the ER at Spartanburg Regional right away. When we got there, they took me right on back, and my surgeon was there within minutes. He looked in my throat, and I had a blood clot the size of a rabbits foot in the back of my throat (which I had now noticed because I could barely breath). He removed the clot right away, and said he would have to take me back for emergency surgery to stop the bleeding.
I woke up a couple hours later, and they tell me that an artery in my neck had busted, and that if I had not come to Spartanburg, and had gone home like UCMC had directed, that I would have soon bled to death. I had already lost over a pint (most of which they had to pump out of my stomach), and was still bleeding like a stuck hog.
So, just some words of advice: stay far away from UCMC!
