HR
Heather Reyes
May 12, 2026
I will never return to this emergency department after my recent experience. For a week, after eating, I have been experiencing severe abdominal pain. The day that I was seen in the ER, was the wrist it had been. 8/10 pain, sweating, feeling faint, nauseous, pale, dizzy. No fever or any other symptoms of being “sick”. Scheduled an appointment with my primary care physician and was referred to the emergency room to rule out gall bladder issues with imaging and bloodwork.
Triage decided I had whatever stomach virus is going around. I told her I didn’t think it was that, it’s episodic. She began explaining that stomach viruses just run their course and there’s not much to do for them. My husband spoke up and said my symptoms weren’t consistent with a stomach bug, they ordered the images and sent me back out to the waiting room.
A nurse came into the waiting room from the back very excitedly asking the discharge nurse working at the desk near the door where a patient had gone. She couldn’t find her patient. The discharge nurse took offense to that and they began arguing loudly in the waiting room. They were complaining loudly to other people about eachother until the shift change happened.
There was an elderly woman in a wheel chair who had been brought to the waiting area from the back. She was told that someone would call an uber for her. When she got to the waiting room, she asked the nurse if an uber had been ordered. The nurse responded that she didn’t know anything about an uber. Didn’t ask any follow up questions or try to figure it out.
The same discharge nurse was speaking to a mother about a note to excuse her son from school. The mother was Spanish speaking. The nurse did not call someone over to help the communication to make sure the note was correct. I intervened and translated for the mother and she left with the note excusing the correct days.
There was another woman in a wheel chair who had asked if she could leave. The same discharge nurse told her no. While she was sitting there she began shaking and making strange sounds. My husband was worried she was having a seizure. He let the nurse know and she responded that it was all behavioral. It continued. The nurse came over and asked the woman if she was okay. When the woman didn’t respond (still shaking and making sounds) the nurse said, Oh, you don’t want to talk to me? Okay. And walked away. That patient was later told by the same nurse that she could have left as soon as she came back into the waiting room.
Still no uber for the elderly woman in the wheel chair. I asked the same nurse, who said no, I don’t see one. But again didn’t try to help solve the problem.
Shift change happened and the new discharge nurse was a lot nicer. The lady in the wheelchair was still waiting. I asked the new discharge nurse (I wish I would have gotten his name!) he called around, found that no one had called and uber for the patient (by this time she had been sitting there for hours, waiting for her uber), called the care home to let them know to expect her and helped her into the uber.
When I went for my imaging, there were staff back there, on their phones, presumably taking a break. Playing music, talking about weekend plans and laughing about another patient that was in there for an ultra sound of his genital area after injury and joking about what must have happened.
I needed to provide a urine sample. When I went to turn it in, I had to get the attention of a nurse on his phone. That same nurse put a wrap on a patients arm in the waiting room and said out loud he didn’t know what he was doing, that his brain wasn’t working that day.
I asked about my sample I was told it was only needed to rule out pregnancy. He asked if I thought I was pregnant. My discharge paperwork says there was no uti- a couple hours later at my primary, they collected urine and turns out I do have a UTI.
I didn’t see a NP, PA or MD before being discharged, except for the one in triage that told me I probably had a stomach bug.
Seriously. Go anywhere else.