Ill Will

Dear UHS,

I know that you’re already under fire for your swine-flu quarantining practices, so criticizing you for something else might be like kicking a lame dog. Everyone can see you’re beleaguered as it is. However, sometimes it’s necessary to kick that lame dog, no matter how trustworthy a companion it has been. If you suddenly find it on your chest as you sleep and it won’t get off, you might have to remove it forcefully. And you, UHS, are weighing me down.

A few weekends ago, I went to you looking for help. I had dislocated my shoulder dancing. Yes, dancing. One too-forceful fist pump, and out popped my shoulder. After several unsuccessful attempts at popping it back into place on my own, I decided to go to you, even though I knew that you usually don’t handle shoulder dislocations. I guess I just thought that having you help call an ambulance might be preferable to having to figure everything out on my own.

But by the time I made it, my shoulder was no longer the main issue. On the way, unwellness overwhelmed me and I passed out, hitting my head on a fence as I fell. Ironically enough, the impact knocked my shoulder back into place. But I had traded the discomfort of a dislocated shoulder for a gash on my head.

You can understand why, once I reached you, all I wanted was a sling for my arm and some stitches for my head. Instead, you gave me a heavy dose of disdain and blame. You openly doubted my story of injuring myself while dancing, even after I told both a nurse and doctor that I had congenitally loose shoulder joints. You looked at me skeptically when I explained how I fell. You asked if I had been drinking, and when I admitted that I had, you rudely thrust a Breathalyzer into my face to register my BAC. At somewhere between .082 and .112, it was above the legal limit to drive—but hardly criminal. Yet that’s what you treated me as. (I was drinking, but that’s not why I fell down.)

Your attending physician, clearly harried and overworked by the usual Saturday night clientele, made no bones about the fact that she had no time for me. She sent me away to Mount Auburn Hospital with only the explanation that she was too busy to tend to me (rather than explain that UHS did not have CT scans and I needed one for my head). At the hospital, I had to wait five hours for my head to be sewn up, but there was none of the attitude that had characterized my time at UHS. No recriminations, no doubting, no judgment. It was professional.

I don’t remember the exact time that I returned to you, UHS, though I think it was somewhere around six or seven in the morning. I sat in the waiting area for a while, sure that I was just going to check in and check out. Little did I know that I was listed under “alcohol-related injuries” and so was going to have to stay until the daytime physician reported for duty. When I left the room they had placed me in to ask what time I could expect to be released (I had planned to work on my thesis prospectus), I got no comprehensible answer to my question.

Instead, the on-duty physician, the same one from the night before, exploded at me: “Do you see any of the other patients roaming the halls making demands? Do you have an appointment? No, I don’t think so. What makes you think you’re so special?” Thoroughly taken aback, I tried to get out that all I wanted was an idea of when I’d be able to leave so that I could plan my day. Frustrated, I trudged back to my room, and a nurse had to be sent in to calm me down. The daytime physician arrived two hours later, and in comparison our interaction was as pleasant as could be.

I wouldn’t make a fuss about this, UHS, if I felt that this treatment was a unique situation. It’s not that I’m singling out the first doctor as malevolent. I understand she was just stressed out, overworked, tired. But you are staffed with academics like her who did not sign on for this, who prefer the low-simmer stress of the classroom to the adrenaline spikes of the emergency room. They are wonderful when it comes to the quotidian checkups that most of us use you for—but when it comes to a head wound, especially on a busy Friday or Saturday, the frightening possibility exists that bedside manner may become a weekend casualty.

Especially if alcohol is involved. Alcohol might make us act drunk, but it makes you, UHS, act crazy. You fixate on the substance rather than on the substantive problems. We hear anecdotes all the time of friends showing up drunk and with broken ankles, yet only treated—with a sneer—for the alcohol. The psychological trauma of having to spend any time in a hospital (where no hospitality is to be found) is hard enough as is without having those who are supposed to “help” only helping increase our sense of shame.

All my best,

Sanders Bernstein

Sanders I. Bernstein ’10, a Crimson arts writer, is a social studies concentrator in Dunster House.