Conemaugh ER, Take Two

A few days back, I reported on a surprisingly quick visit by my brother to the ER at the Conemaugh Memorial Medical Center.

My brother was back at that ER Saturday night with an allergic reaction to medicine prescribed in visit one and, as a statistician might note, there was a reversion to the mean.

Specifically, where the previous visit had been an uncharacteristically brief encounter lasting an hour or so from dropoff to my brother being back at his home, Saturday night it was more like an eight-hour experience. It turns out the quick ER visit was the statistical outlier and the typical ER visit still is going to be more oriented to the ordeal end of the scale.

I guess I jinxed it all by writing about the surprising improvement last time.

At the risk of belaboring a point, these sorts of unpleasant interactions with Conemaugh have been more the norm since the sale of the place to Duke LifePoint in 2014. It wasn’t perfect before. It was, however, better.

I got the call at about 8:30 p.m. from my brother, telling me the swelling, itching, etc., that we had discussed earlier in the day had worsened and he thought it was again time to go the ER.

Nearly eight hours later, at approximately 4:30 a.m., I dropped him off at his home.

He described an ER and surrounding areas crammed with people, many of them on mobile reclining chairs of sorts. Some had IV’s attached. Others sat with a vacant stare common to those stuck in this healthcare purgatory for mini-eternities.

I’m thinking of Dante’s line from “The Divine Comedy,” “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

Is this the pleasant surprise one state house candidate promised the masses when the Conemaugh sale was taking place? If so, I’ll take a double shot of unpleasant, please.

By the time I got up Sunday, having gone to bed around 5 a.m., it was a sunny afternoon and perhaps time to cut the grass.

I had planned on a medicine run. Unfortunately, my brother is loyal to a failing national pharmacy chain that doesn’t fill prescriptions on Sundays, so he will wait until Monday to get a fresh bit of medication

I pray this works, and he won’t soon be returning to the Conemaugh ER.