I was sitting in my office speaking to one of my customer’s, a nurse for a local hospital, when the realization hit me. She told me she was an emergency room nurse at Island General Hospital. “Very good emergency room,” I said- “clean… They get you in quickly. Not as good as Westside Hospital,” I added. “You have chest pains they run you right through triage. That’s impressive. Much better then Doctors Hospital of Nassau County, but not as good as South Shore Hospital. They are right up there with the speed of Westside Hospital, but they also pop an aspirin in your mouth and get your chest x-rayed as you are lying on the gurney. Those are the best in our area, though” I said.
“How many emergency rooms have you been to?” she queried. “Well those four, as I’ve said, are the best in our area. I’ve also been at Eastern Nassau. They are pretty good there, but again, not as fast as the others and then maybe three more. Yes, Delaney General… very slow. You could go into cardiac arrest before a doctor sees you. Good Faith Hospital…slow, no aspirin and they always have someone buffing the floors. Clean, but annoying. And SuffolkGeneral… place is filthy. You are better off having a heart attack than going there.”
“How bad is your heart condition?” she asks.
“Oh. I don’t have a heart condition. Usually it turns out to be something gastric.”
“You mean you are not a cardiac patient and you’ve walked into eight emergency rooms in the past two years?” She seemed puzzled.
“Well I have only walked into five. The other three times I went by ambulance. Scared the heck out of my wife the first time,” I said.
“Only the first time?” she questioned.
“Well after that, I kept her out of the loop. The next two times I left her a note that I was having chest pains and that I met the ambulance outside so I wouldn’t disturb her sleep. After that, the insurance company said I would have to pay for any future ambulance trips… and that’s a fortune. So, I started driving myself then.”
“Sounds like anxiety or panic attacks. You must be a hypochondriac,” she observed.
“Hypochondriac? Me?” I mean my friends and family have always called me that, but I thought they were just teasing me- trying to ease my fears about the real health problems that I had that haven’t yet, been correctly diagnosed.
Note: Hospital names have been changed to protect the mediocre.