Team Rescue needs you

Team Rescue

Last week as I was sitting in a hospital wait room I started to think about things. In particular you think about things when you are 48 hours away from Thanksgiving. As my mother laid in a bed in the emergency room, I had the opportunity to see first hand the lay of our land. One young woman in her mid thirties was delivered in on a stretcher sick from her flight. The Port Authority police were carrying her luggage in behind her. Then another man in his fifties was in the trauma room having received a beating from kids who just saw an older man by himself. They did not rob him. They just beat him. Then there was the elderly woman who died while I went to get a cup of coffee. Her daughter’s bleating cries nearly breaking everyone in the ER’s heart. The nurse’s were obviously over worked and physically taxed but they tried desperately to make each patient comfortable.

I was sent outside to the waiting room while shifts changed and could see visibly the cross section of the world. The people in this room in tattered clothes with tear-streaked children were all there waiting. Whether waiting to be called or waiting to hear about the status of their loved ones they all had the same thing in common. Waiting. We seem to all be waiting on something. In truth we should not be waiting but living.

Waiting is what we think when we are rushing into a hospital. Sure sometimes our bodies do not cooperate with us. Often it appears they are our worst enemy. I am sure that there were people in that rooms sitting with me were very concerned. The truth is if you do not have you health living becomes harder. As I watch my mother battle against COPD, I am learning more and more about medicine and its demands. The truth of the matter is that hospitals cannot fight the good fight without good staff. So stretched was the staff that it was nearly 2 hours before we received our ambulette to deliver us home. When I approached the clerk at the desk to know that I was still sitting there waiting, she shrugged embarrassed and called the dispatcher again. Each ambulette team I have met seemed to express the same concerns. The struggle of trying hard to do their job with so little help. Too many hours on the road with stressful jobs is causing them to resign after 5 years.

I think part of the issue is that we should encourage our children to do the noble jobs of doctors, nurses and emts. That’s the true issue at hand. If we had more staff then maybe fewer of these great people would be quitting.

So the next time you see an ambulance passing you by think nicely of them.