Thursday, March 12, 2009

My brush with emergency services in NYC

One fine day instead of going to my class in the afternoon I decided to go home. I was feeling very weak. I walked as fast as I could like a true NewYorker. If only I can reach home in time and lie down, I will be fine, I kept telling myself. The train took forever to come. When it reached 157th street station, it stopped and people were asked to vacate the train. There was an emergency in the previous train so the trains behind were all stuck too. By this time I was feeling pretty sick and couldn't get up and leave. A lady asked me if I was feeling ok, and called some train personnel. He called 911.

It felt like it was forever before the FDNY guys came down. The first thing they did was whip out a form and start asking questions ... demographic questions not medical ones. If I was well enough to answer such questions would I need the emergency service in the first place?

Suddenly they decided to take me out to the ambulance, probably because the train needed to move. At last, I thought, they are going to take me to the hospital and I might not die after all. The ambulance was parked just outside the station and it remained there for next 10-15 minutes. The question answer session resumed. I never realized how long my first and last name are before that day. Believe me it is beyond frustrating to talk when you are fainting, then to repeat the name because your's is an Indian name and worse ... one of the most difficult last name in India and one of the longest Indian first name. I gave them my wallet that had the college id card hoping it would satisfy basic questions like name, affiliation, insurance info etc. I then gave them my phone with my boss's phone number on it. Hoping that they would ask him the questions and I could continue fainting in peace.

When my boss picked up the phone, the FDNY guy asked, 'is this person your employee?'. John, being a good boss he is thought it was an information mining call and refused to say anything unless told why they needed the information. The FDNY guys did not tell them it was an emergency, probably in some convoluted way an effort not to invade my privacy.

All this time the second FDNY guy was trying to put an oxygen mask on my face. The mask didn't work and it made me nautious so I was trying to remove it. This was going on parallely to the Q&A and fainting. I startd to question why we were still parked and not moving towards the hospital. The answer was totally baffling. The FDNY guy who was filing out the questionaire was the person who would drive the ambulance so unless I 'co-operated' I wasn't going anywhere.

By this time, the second person in the ambulance, the one with the oxygen mask, started interjecting every few minutes, saying "I can't get her pulse. hurry." It is a miracle I survived those 15 minutes in the ambulance in spite of his constant reminder that I might be dying.

Add a third person in the mix now. The person from the MTNY. He came with his own questionaire and started asking me the same questions. They had to cover their behinds too since it happened while I was travelling in their train. I had to answer the same questions all over again. I guess the FDNY couldn't share that information for fear of breaching confidentiality. ;)

Finally we reached the hospital..... ER hallway more like it. Somebody put a pulse monitor on my finger. I was relieved that somebody was monitoring me even if I was in the hallway. Nothing happened for a long time and then somebody came and 'borrowed' the pulse monitor. Never came back.
After lying down in the hallway for a long time I automatically started feeling better. (I was amazed at my capacity to survive in the face of adversity ;) ) But now ER doctor wouldn't let me go. She needed to check if I had internal bleeding. Another long wait, in a room this time, after which I left for home at 10 pm with an unreadable pink paper and without any diagnosis.
After 15 months and 3 hefty medical bills I still don't know what happened that evening and why I am still alive :)
Though the experience was traumatic, the whole story seems like a funny episode in a comedy movie script. Anybody wants the movie rights?