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Emergency Room in Atlanta
December 19, 2025Area: Atlanta
I am thinking tonight about corruption.
I just received a nice message from [Redacted] Urgent Care in Atlanta. They thanked me for my visit yesterday and asked me how likely I am to recommend their facility to others. I was tempted to respond to their AI bot by asking if they expect me to come over, wave a huge flag and belt out, "God Bless America"?
I went there yesterday because I woke up with diabetic ketoacidosis. That is what happens if you are diabetic and your blood glucose (sugar) gets very high (500 and up). It is a life threatening condition. I woke up and fell over on the floor and couldn't get up. Then I passed out and was unconscious for a few hours. I woke up, again, and smelled fruit. The fruity-sweet smell is associated with very high blood sugar. High enough to kill you. I took some insulin and got on the phone. I was still confused but I knew I needed to go to the ER. I was too confused and dizzy to be sensible. If I were in my right mind, I should have called 911. But I wasn't thinking very well so I called my oldest daughter. She came over, obviously exhausted after a busy week of working, and brought me some test strips. They were not the correct size. Obviously I didn't have sense enough to send her a photo of the right ones. So my brain was not functioning correctly, my chest kept hurting, and and my kid got an early dose of "What I'll have to deal with when mom's brain finally goes to shit."
Then she took me to an urgent care clinic that she was familiar with. [Redacted] Urgent care. Now that place was quite an adventure. The Physician's Assistant, listened to my problems, and did a EKG test. This is a test to see how your heart is functioning. As soon as she did the test she started telling us some inconvenient truth.
She said this is an urgent situation. And if you have an urgent situation, the last place you want to go is to an Urgent Care Clinic. The clinics, she said, are all owned by pharmaceutical companies to scam people out of more money. Now the clinic did accept Medicare, as required by Georgia law, but not really, ya know?
That's when my daughter started crying. That broke my heart. She doesn't cry often, but she had been confronted with the absolute truth about our health care system. The corruption is blatant and completely uncaring. In the old days (1970s/80s) we would get health insurance with a job. It cost maybe $40 a month or so, and you had to pay hefty "premiums" is you actually had to use your health care, but it was available back then, and a lot less expensive than it is now. Every American thinks he is really a billionaire who is just temporarily broke. So you work all your life. Then you get to your 50's and suddenly nobody wants to hire an 'old guy' anymore. So jobs are much harder to find. Without that job you have no health insurance. Finally, if you're lucky and live long enough, you can 'retire' and be eligible for Medicare. That's when you see the final reality. Neither Medicare nor Medicaid pays for dental work. They don't pay for eye exams or eye glasses. They also don't pay for hearing aids. You finally realize that the real America is telling you, "you're too old or ugly to work" and "hurry up and die".
You may have a car crash and have a back injury like a herniated disc, for example. When all you have is Medicaid, the doctors won't even diagnose your condition. They won't tell you if there is a corrective surgery that is only available to rich people. People with jobs. At least, people who still have health insurance. People who are not on Medicare or Medicaid yet. People who are still unaware of how difficult it is to find doctors who accept Medicare or Medicaid patients. Or hospitals.
That's when the nurse said the absolute worst possible thing ... she turned to my daughter and asked, "So. Is she your grandmother?" I mean, WTAF? I can't help but laugh about it now, because the nurse, like me, definitely lacked a few people skills. At any rate, I just asked my daughter to drive me to a hospital ER and I would call her later. They have to treat me, right? It's Georgia law, right?
The Urgent Care nurse had given us instructions on how to behave in order to successfully see a doctor. "Keep up the waterworks," she told my daughter, smiling rather like a demon. She wrote out a list of dangerous signs she had seen on my heart test (EKG), and gave me a copy of the test to show the doctor. She gave us the important "how to catch a doctor's attention" information.
So I arrived at the ER, proof-of-illness papers clutched in my hand, shoulders straight, determined to see the elusive medical doctor. I went through triage pretty quickly. I showed the nurse my papers. She asked more questions. Yes, my chest hurt. Yes dizziness and fainting. That's when she called the doc over and I saw him, for the only time. Nurse said, "potential stroke symptoms". The doc started asking me questions. I tried to show him the paper and my EKG results and he brushed them out of my hand. They did a full 3 second EKG, and the doctor ripped the paper out of the machine before it was finished and said. "No heart attack!" Normally an EKG test is for more than two heart beats. I went to nursing school back in the day. I had seen many of them before. This is not normal. What did I think was wrong with my heart? "It hurts, and I've had heart attacks before.' But why tonight, he demanded. "It hurts... plus I had dizziness and fainting." I couldn't determine exactly what information he was trying to get out of me with his seemingly random questions. Why do you think you fainted he said. I said, "I've been diagnosed with congestive heart failure and my blood sugar was high. I was out of test strips and the urgent care clinic tested my blood sugar at over 500. And that was after I took 12 units of insulin R." That's when the doctor unexpectedly surprised me. "I can see how much you enjoy diagnosing yourself, but that is bullshit."
Silly me. Up until that point I had assumed that medicine, like the rest of the universe, operated on cause and effect, and logic ... things happen for reasons and there are tests to prove things like heart ventricular fibrillation, blood glucose levels ... the sort of stuff that doctors try to learn in medical school. So the doctor sneered at me and said, "Get her out of here".
I remember when my late husband, John, had informed me that he had learned, over the years, that logic is the most unfair to win an argument. I can verify that this is true. Here I was, a 63 year old woman, and, again, doctors were not believing me because I am female. Or maybe it's because I am on the autism spectrum, and had pissed him off somehow with an inappropriate response. Yes, we still live in those dark times. Then he stomped out and they took some blood and looked at my vital signs and, after I picked up my papers that the doctor had knocked out of my hands, and was sent back to the waiting room. They told me I would see the doc in about 3 hours.
That's fairly normal in Atlanta, so I sat there dealing with my chest pains, my ketoacidosis and other symptoms. In the USA they do NOT give you pain meds any more, even when you have a heart attack. Then I asked again, and after 11 hours I convinced one of the nurses to check my blood sugar, something American hospitals don't do any more. It was still high, at 430. After 12 hours I asked the people at reception how much longer it might be before I could see the doctor? They said, 7 or 8 more hours. Thee were not that many people in the waiting room. I knew that if I did not get out of there soon I would die. So I pestered my daughter and she called me an uber at 6 am. It was all I could do to get them to take the IV out of my arm.
I felt like it was my fault. I worked at Emory School of Medicine for years and learned medical terminology. Then I went to nursing school. That was a mistake that ensured that the medical terminology would never escape my brain. I couldn't help but use it when asked specific questions.
I couldn't help but notice, as I walked out of the ER, that most all of the people who had been waiting 8 hours or more to see a doctor were all women. One of them, after sitting there for maybe 3 hours, keeled over on the floor. Not one doctor or nurse went to check and see if she had died, so I did. I walked over and looked to see if she was breathing, and asked her "Are you okay there, honey?" She snored in answer, so I could assume that she was alive. But I pointed her out to a nurse, and said she just fell over. The nurse said, "She's probably homeless. She probably came here to sleep because it's freezing outside." And the nurse, like the doctor had done, passed by and did not check on her.
So we, the aged, the female, the poor continued to sit in the "hurry up and die" chairs of the waiting room. I was lucky to be able to leave.
But out of the nightmare of that entire night, they did one thing that I can never, ever forgive. They made my daughter cry. That is what made me dust off the old keyboard and start writing. Yes, I am guilty of speaking truth aloud. I am writing and damn the consequences. I will not shut up again.
