My Mother Fell Last Week

My 87-year-old mother fell last week. They couldn't reach me right away, so she drove herself to the "ER" in what used to be Lakewood Hospital. I arrived about an hour later.  In the ensuing three hours, they managed to get her hideously abraded left leg bandaged.  As she stood up to leave she realized that her right foot was painful.  An x-ray was taken and read by a presumably off-site radiologist, and a fracture was diagnosed.  They put her in a half-cast and sent us off to an Orthopedic practice.  The first thing that the Orthopedic specialist did when he entered the room was to press on my mother's foot in the area of the supposed fracture and realized immediately that the fracture shown on the x-ray was an old one and that her foot was not fractured, but merely sprained.  No one at the Lakewood Urgent Care had bothered to verify that her area of pain matched the area of the fracture on the x-ray.

Sooooo . . . . . . . take the so-called "ER" off your list of medical resources not only for cardiac, respiratory, and stroke issues, but for possible broken bones as well.  They did do a good job of bandaging her abrasions, so if you need a band-aid for your boo-boo you might be all right.

My mother was seen by a Physician's Assistant who said she had no experience in Orthopedic matters, an RN, and the EMT who casted her.  They were lovely, caring, friendly people.  They were also entirely incapable of providing the level of care that my mother has come to expect from that location over the course of her life in Lakewood, even in a matter as straightforward as whether her foot was broken or not.  It certainly points up how relatively useless an Urgent Care is in place of a real ER attached to a real hospital, staffed with real doctors of various specialties.

Please, please, please remember when the election comes around this fall that Mayor Summers and his yes-man Council gave away our full-service hospital, along with a non-compete clause to ensure that we would never again have the medical resources most of us have grown up with.  They gave it away in exchange for an Urgent Care where you dare not take your sore foot, and some doctor's offices.  Their lack of concern for the wellbeing of the citizens they were elected to represent is breathtaking.  Remember, because next time it may be YOUR 87 year old mother.