I was visiting home last Tuesday night and was just leaving when my mother, Phylis Corso, came home from work early. She told me she thought she was having a heart attack and needed to go to the hospital.
She didn’t look well. She didn’t sound well.
She called her primary doctor and was told to go to Southside Hospital in Bay Shore, where she was told to see a specialist who worked there.
It was too far for an ambulance ride, so my father, Phil Corso Sr., and I helped her into the car and sped through the 20-minute drive from Ronkonkoma to the hospital’s emergency room. We pulled up at 7 p.m.
I jumped out of the moving car and ran in to speak to the front desk.
“I think my mother’s having a heart attack. Is there anyone who can help me?”
The woman there looked at me, waited a second, and then asked, “Do you need someone to help you?”
This would be the first of many bizarro-world mishaps that would pile up that night and the next day.
She was taken for an X-ray. But the man who wheeled her out came back minutes later with a different woman.
“Gee, Phyl, that X-ray changed you,” my dad joked, to lighten up what was actually a deeply concerning mistake.
“You mean that’s not her?” the man asked.
“No.”
“Oh!”
The other woman, whose face was frozen with confusion, was wheeled away, and my mom was eventually returned to her room.
The ER doctor came by, but only after staffers visited my mom several times — to ask how she would be paying for her visit, and making sure she could cover the co-pay.
The doctor asked my mother questions about her symptoms, and told her she needed to stay the night until her specialist was back at work.
So that’s what we did.
I started tweeting to keep tabs on every update, or lack thereof, to communicate with my friends and family asking about my mother’s status.
I tagged the hospital in hopes they would send someone to see her. They did, eventually, and did tests, but it took many hours.
The staff “performed two blood samples, a CAT scan, an X-ray and an echo scan over the last 16 hours and they’ve shared zero of the results with us,” I tweeted. “We haven’t heard anything about them.”
— Phil Corso (@philcorso) December 12, 2018
By noon the next day, we were still in “observation,” or emergency room limbo.
The doctor she went there to see still hadn’t seen her. We were told to wait some more. I could see in her face that my mother was giving up. She started crying. “Can I at least have a Tylenol?”
She never received a meal. By hour 17, a nurse sounded surprised that she hadn’t been given breakfast. That nurse never returned.
When I tried to get her vending machine food, the machine spit back my dollars in exchange for $1 in coins. When I tried my credit card, it said I had insufficient funds.
All the while, we saw hospital staff members dining merrily on baked ziti at a staff-only holiday party. There were café tables decked out in Christmas-themed draping. Festive tunes played in the background.
At noon, we were told her doctor was in an emergency, but he had not forgotten about us. Soon after, we were told he wasn’t actually in, but that he would arrive “hopefully” around 3 p.m. By 3 p.m., we were told he wouldn’t be in until later in the evening.
We never saw that doctor.
By 3:30 p.m., we had given up, and prepared to leave. I was tweeting all the while, tagging Northwell Health, which eventually spurred the hospital’s Twitter handle to respond to me via direct message.
“We really appreciate you taking the time to provide more details,” they said. “We’re reaching out to the teams onsite.”
“To do what?” I asked. They never responded.
Two corporate representatives for the hospital arrived just as we were packing up to go. We got to corporate before we got to a cardiologist. The reps started reconnecting my mother to her monitors, which she’d taken out herself. They wanted to “make it right.”
Suddenly, nurses and doctors were all around our tiny enclave in the emergency room.
My mother was finally given detailed notes on all her tests, except for her echo test, which was somehow still not ready after eight hours.
Even so, after waiting some more, we were told that no one knew where to find the specialist to determine why mother’s chest and head were aching.
We gave up at 4:30 p.m. for good.
They made my mother sign a waiver saying she was leaving “against medical advice,” adding that if “anything were to happen to her,” it basically wouldn’t be on them.
We were home by 5 p.m. – 22 hours after arriving.
Her chest still hurt. Her head still hurt. But at least she was home.
She got on the phone and arranged her own doctor visits for the next day and coming week.
Phil Corso is a news editor at the New York Post.
Source: Read Full Article