LETTER TO THE EDITOR: Patient unhappy with service

Dear Editor:
Published: May 21, 2008

I am writing with a complaint about the Lake City Community Hospital Emergency Room. In November 2007 during the Thanksgiving holiday, I was visiting my parents in Lake City and my daughter had to rush me to the Emergency Room at the Lake City Community Hospital. I regularly suffer from severe migraines but feared it might have been something much worse given the amount of pain I was in.
Upon arrival at the Emergency Room, they treated me as if I had a bad cold and completely disregarded the severity of my pain.
After waiting for over an hour, I asked my daughter to just please take me back to my parents’ home. In the end it did turn out to be a severe migraine, but more intensely painful than any I could remember.
I let my experience with the Emergency Room pass without complaint but on April 29 my 83 year-old father woke in the night with terrible pain in his back.
His pain was so terrible, in fact, that before daylight my mother-who does not drive anymore-had to call my sister to come drive them to the Emergency Room. She was there in record time and had them to the Emergency Room within minutes but upon entering no one was at the desk.
A lady with a purse and coat over her arm was walking out, like her shift had ended, turned back and said “I’ll put him on the list,” which she did. But after that my ailing 83 year-old father was not seen or spoken to by anyone on the medical or administrative staff at the hospital. After about an hour of this unacceptable and potentially dangerous behavior, my sister was forced to choose between remaining in the ER waiting room at Lake City Community Hospital or drive my father another 25 minutes to the ER in Florence.
When they arrived in Florence, my father was seen immediately given his age and severity of his pain, they took x-rays and, luckily, found out that he had a kidney stone and not a more threatening health issue.
It has been a few days now, my father has finally passed his kidney stone and all is right with the world-except for the experience with that place ironically called the “Emergency Room” at Lake City Community Hospital.
I know there are some fine folks that work at that hospital but protocol and priority need to be addressed by the ER staff and physicians when it comes to people entering those emergency room doors in great pain. I thought I was having a migraine but was not positive; my father thought he may be passing a kidney stone but was not positive.
We are lucky and blessed to have come out of those experiences with no real medical trauma. But, someone someday is going to come through those Emergency Room doors at Lake City Community Hospital in great pain and be forced to sit right there and die before they are even acknowledged or seen.
It is the belief of myself and my family-who are longtime residents of Lake City-that the Lake City Community Hospital Emergency Room needs to take a long, hard look at how they assess and treat ER patients or just close their doors.
Treat everyone or treat no one!

Sincerely,
Alice Barry