English A&E

You know how in the US we call the Emergency Room the ER? Well, in England the official name is the Accident and Emergency centre, and everyone calls it the A&E. We had our first A&E experience here on Sunday night...

I guess it actually started Saturday morning, when I woke up with a weird cramp in the back of my right knee. It was painful enough throughout the day that I was limping during our stroll in the country, and I felt quite nauseated from the pain. I tried stretching and rubbing it and moving different directions and finally keeping still. It didn't subside or change, no matter what I did. I took some aspirin before bed and woke up with the same pain Sunday morning. Weird. All through church and all afternoon it continued to ache and throb without subsiding much.

By evening, Brian and I were both quite concerned. Our main worry was that it might be a blood clot. We read online about clot symptoms and were further concerned. Then, I happened to talk to my brother, Blaine, who actually HAD a blood clot on Friday night and was treated in his local ER! He described his symptoms and that was enough to convince us we better get mine checked out. So, at 10.45pm we woke up Sammie and headed off to our local A&E. What an experience!

As you probably know, health care in the UK is free -- even the A&E, thanks to heavy taxes that fund the national health system (NHS). I can't draw a direct correlation, but I am personally biased toward the belief that the "free" system encourages some less favorable people and circumstances to attend the A&E on a Sunday night, at least that was our case. We were surrounded by stench and filth. The whole room felt more like a crowded bus terminal than a hospital. Hard metal chairs, dirty floors, and unfriendly staff were a few of the less pleasant items. There was a crowd of four or five middle-aged men waiting to be treated who were obviously fully inebriated; one had a very disgusting carpenter's crack, two others were tattooed and shirtless, all were muttering unintelligible comments about their various needs and the lack of service. Poor Sammie who was awake waaay past her bed time, kept squirming in her car seat, struggling to get out and crawl around on a less-than-clean floor; we didn't let her, so she got even more frustrated.

After waiting for about 45 minutes, a male nurse brought me into a back room, where he took my temperature, pulse and blood pressure. He then told me a doctor would eventually have a look at my leg and if they thought it was blood clot, they'd probably arranged to run a scan in the morning. In the MORNING?? Then what in the WORLD were we doing there at midnight??! We waited a further forty minutes, being entertained by the drunk crew and a little girl who had succeeded in crawling around in the filth despite her mother's and fellow onlookers' comments about how dirty it was. Still no doctor. I finally got fed up and told Brian to take us home.

Instead we drove to another hospital with a different A&E, where a much more attentive nurse gave me an initial examination -- including feeling my leg and asking me questions about my pain and my general health-- and assured me she didn't think it was blood clot. She said I could wait to be seen by a doctor there, but it would be a couple of hours, as they were very busy that night. Since it was already 2 a.m., I opted to go home and let Brian and Sammie (and me) get a few hours of sleep. First thing Monday morning, I went to the doctor's office and got an official diagnosis from the doctor on call. No, it's not a blood clot. It looks as though I've strained the ligaments on the back of knee. One of the doctor's first questions to me was, "Have you recently walked up and down a lot of stairs, carrying Samantha?" Ahhh... the stairs, once again.

Anyway, that whole A&E experience was something interesting, and something I don't wish to repeat!