5 /5 Vanessa Lockard: ER visit:
I took my 16 year old son to the ER after he fell in school and had horrible knee pain. He couldn’t walk on the leg it hurt so bad. The waiting room was full so I was afraid he was in for a long wait. We checked in at the window. It took about 30 minutes for us to have a nurse (Shelby) ask questions, check his blood pressure and have the doctors assistant (Abby) order some tests. He was given pain medicine before leaving the first area. The nurse was very apologetic and let us know we would most likely be there a few hours and most of it in the waiting room. There wasn’t a room my son could go in. We even saw and heard the helicopter come and go two times while we were there! It was so busy!
He was in a wheelchair in the waiting room waiting for the X-ray test. It didn’t take very long to have it completed. Once the medicine kicked in he was much more comfortable. They also had an ice pack on his knee to help. We did wait. It turned out he broke a little piece of bone off of his knee and there were pieces floating around in the cartilage. He was given a knee brace to wear and crutches, a couple of days worth of pain medicine and told he needed to follow up with a specialist since it could require surgery. (It was not life or death so it was standard that if he needed surgery it would be done a different day.) He was sent home about 4 1/2 hours after arriving.
We ended up going to Lucile Packard Children’s hospital for follow up due to my son’s unrelated medical condition.
1) The Hazel Hawkins ER visit was quicker to get him into tests and medicated than Stanford ER.
2) The orthopedic specialist at Stanford was impressed that he had a CD with the X-ray and MRI photos, from Hazel Hawkins ER trip. It saved him several days of waiting to understand what was happening.
Thank you to Dr Bogey, Shelby RN, Abby PA, Mylene RN, Maya RN, and Katie tech for taking such great care of my son!
I realized that it was a good thing that my son was well enough to wait. I explained to him that the people that can’t wait are having true serious emergencies or could even be life or death.
