To the ER :’-(
After well over $650,000 in hospital bills and we had not yet been to the emergency room. That all changed last night. I came home from work and my mom mentioned that the bump on his chest seemed to be bigger than normal. He had always had a bump from where the sternum comes back together, and I didn’t really give it much thought. My parents left and less than 2 minutes later he puked. I started changing him and immediately knew something was wrong when I took off his shirt. I immediately called the cardiologist on her personal cell phone (one perk of having a complexly fragile child is that you have immediate access to all kinds of great doctors willing to let you call them at any time of day or night). She told me that I needed to go to the ER and she called ahead to let them know we were on the way and she also called her counterpart Dr. Loker to let him know that we were coming in. My next call was to Sarah, “Don’t freak out, something is wrong with Evan, I’m taking him to the ER. The bump on his chest is the size of a golf ball.”
After cleaning Evan up and getting his stuff around I high-tailed it to Bronson. Sarah was there and waiting for me in front of the ER. I got to the ER at about 6pm on Monday January 30th. After blood tests, 2 chest x-rays, and a CT scan there was talk about sending us directly to Ann Arbor from the ER but Mott Children’s hospital did not have any available beds (stay tuned for the bitching). We were instead admitted to Bronson and moved to a hospital room at about 12:30 AM Tuesday with the intention of moving us to Ann Arbor when a bed opened up. Well it’s been 12 hours and we still have not heard anything about moving to Ann Arbor. I’m getting pretty irritated and after i’m done writing this post I am going to start making phone calls to U of M myself, squeaky wheel gets the oil, right?
“We do not have any beds available.” B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T. You have a brand new $754 million hospital and there are entire wings of empty beds. The actual problem is that there is not enough staff to open the rooms. In all my vast knowledge of hospital operations (none) I can’t understand how you open a brand new facility with all this increased capacity and not hire the staff to run it. I know they are hiring like crazy and training people but perhaps this should have been done before the hospital opened since it takes 3 months to train people.
OH…. nurse just came in, there is a bed available in Ann Arbor!!! Finally! They are preparing the paperwork for the transfer. We should be rolling by 1:30pm. More updates to come later.
