Fails and misses

OFF to Marriott I went last Saturday for a friend’s birthday celebration, ready to clock up some good memories.

Lelani P. Echaves

Thinking aloud

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Except that I did not count on the slippery floor of Marriott Hotel. Before I even reached the dining area, I had already slipped twice. On the second, I landed on my behind.

The waiters were concerned and considerate. They called for a nurse, gave me a cold compress for the back of my hip, and brought me a plate of food for dinner. In about five minutes, the hotel’s nurse was by my side, asking where my pains were, and offering to escort me to the hospital for an X-ray.

So my plan for a two-hour dinner with friends got scaled down to 20 minutes. The rest of the evening was at the Perpetual Succor Hospital’s emergency room.

Waiting, per se, can be challenging. The minutes you spend filling out the information details sheet to the time when the resident physician finally makes his almighty presence, can go an hour or more.

As if this stretch of time is not an ordeal enough, there’s also the flurry of insensitive questions and quickened mouthing of a script.

After asking how I fell and where my pains were, a lady intern immediately nosedived into “What are your plans, Ma’am?” I said, “What do you mean?”

“I mean, do you plan to sue the hotel?” The question floored me. “Of all the initial questions to ask me, why that?”

“Ma’am, that’s because if you plan to sue the hotel, then we cannot issue you a medical certificate unless you get admitted. We don’t have a medico-legal officer here.”

Still reeling from my scene-by-scene recall of how I fell, lost my bearings and fell again, I found the intern totally insensitive. I said, “I don’t understand what you mean.”

And then she repeated the script, this time starting with the reverse. “We don’t have a medico-legal officer here, Ma’am. So we cannot issue you a medical certificate unless you get admitted, if you plan to sue the hotel.”

While waiting for the X-ray results, I was given three copies of the hospital’s “Discharge against Medical Advice.” I was to sign that I had insisted on being discharged against the advice of their attending physician.”

The nurse said, “Ma’am, you have to sign this.” I said, “You know, this is dishonest. I have not even seen your resident physician, and have not seen nor been informed about the X-ray results. So what medical advice has been given so far that I supposedly did not heed?”

Another nurse came and asked, “Ma’am, dili gyud diay ka magpa-admit (You refuse admission at the hospital)?” “Depends, Miss, on the X-ray results. If I need to, I will. But your resident physician should appear and talk to me first.”

“Coming na siya, Ma’am.” So they said an hour earlier, and still he was a no-show. It was a lean night at the hospital; only four of the 14 beds had patients. This was one night when nurses and interns outnumbered the patients. But what an insensitive bunch they still proved to be!

(lelani.echaves@gmail.com)