I believe I came to a shitty ER at an even shittier time -- Saturday night at 1:30am, and I got the worst of the worst people on staff.

Somehow they made the boneheaded mistake of forgetting to ask about my current meds. I don't think it was a conscious decision to copy-paste my March 2020 meds into the system as current. It probably defaults to that, until they change it.

The doctor (who was only a DO, not an MD) assigned my case to the PA, when he didn't deem my situation to be serious.

Recall I kept asking for them to test my uric acid -- something they refused the entire way, but oddly did despite claiming they were outright refusing my request. (I only found this out weeks later that it was done.)

The PA, who I hadn't met yet, probably thought I was a combative asshole for repeatedly demanding the uric acid thing, and didn't really want to see me. She went over my test results on her own, and between the foot swelling and the low potassium, prescribed both potassium and diuretic pills, of course not having the info that I was already on them.

Once I told the nurse I was already on these, and asked to speak to the PA, she still didn't want to come out, not really wanting to deal with me. She hid in the back, told the nurse to tell me to "take them anyway", (erroneously) believing that doubling up wouldn't do me any harm.

When I reported the whole mess to the Patient Safety manager a few days later, she investigated and realized that they really did fuck up the meds thing, but of course didn't want to admit it. So she reverse-engineered a story around why everything happened the way it did, and hoped I'd go away. When I wouldn't accept it, she got flustered, hung up on me, and closed the case.

When I tracked down her boss, she was probably receptive during the call, but upon seeing that the hospital really did fuck up (plus I didn't have any actual damages they had to worry about), she probably decided to just ignore me and hope I'd give up.

When I persistently called and clearly wasn't letting this go, she assigned her underling -- that original Patient Safety manager -- to take this to upper management for permission to just wipe the damn $350 without admitting wrondoing, and letting this die. Permission was given, and here we are.



You might wonder why I put so much effort into saving $350. It was because I was so pissed about how I was treated there -- a combination of incompetence and arrogance -- that I refuse to pay them for this malpratice-ridden "care". It wasn't worth my time to save the $350, but I'm very glad I did it, because they didn't deserve my money for all this fail. Plus, they got paid thousands by the insurance, which I can't control.

Anyway, this does show how flawed the entire "patient safety" process is at these hospitals. They are only interested in covering their ass and reverse engineering stories to fit their narrative, rather than doing any real investigation. It's amazing that, despite my being clear that all I wanted was the $350 wiped off my account -- and that I was willing to sign a document promising it -- they still put so much effort into pushing back at me. It took my obtaining of the smoking gun evidence of their fuckup AND tons of follow-up phone calls to finally get this done.

I won't be going back to this place. There's another ER about the same distance from where I live, so I'll be going to that one next time.

The end.