I get this. Work is a bit competitive at times, taking time off is difficult enough. Many doctors also do not take you seriously unless you’ve had an issue for a significant amount of time or unless it’s serious enough.
In my area, when they ask what you do and you say “I’m a farmer” things get really serious really fast.
Usually the blood is enough of an indication.
I was heavy drinking whiskey with my friend and a couple girls at my apartment when I was 20. I told my friend to cut me with a steak knife - we were punk rock kids and I thought I was a badass, it was very stupid. So he’s giving me these light cuts that are barely bleeding on my upper arm. One of the girls says can I cut you? I said sure, and put the knife in her hand. She grabbed my wrist and went full bore at my forearm, cut me to the bone. It took some doing but I got the bleeding stopped, did a pretty bad one-handed job with a rag for a bandage.
Some other folks came over and one of them decided to fix me a better bandage. When he saw the wound he’s like you need to go to the hospital, but I was intent on partying. Being the good friend that he was, he came pounding on my door the next morning at 7AM and insisted that he was taking me to the hospital.
When I got there, they found out that I didn’t have health insurance and refused to treat me at all. They said it had been too long since it happened. It got severely infected and took about three months to heal and now I’ve got a wicked scar. American healthcare was and is a disaster.
I’m sorry, what?
Had you gone to the hospital when you first got stabbed, the hospital is legally required to fix you up. But instead you decided to party and went to the hospital too late, and now blame the healthcare system instead of yourself. You are the one that asked to be stabbed, then complain about healthcare later. Did you drink leaded gas as a kid ?
Where I live, they fix everyone. No matter how stupid they are. This should be the way.
Curious - do they give them help for the stab wound and/or refer them to substance abuse or mental health programs in a situation like this?
Kids, remember: The cornerstone of any healthcare system is YOU CARING ABOUT YOUR HEALTH. Don’t fuck around with your health.
If you do stupid shit for fun, make at least sure it kills you and doesn’t leave you with lifelong disability.
Kids, remembet: The corner stone of american healthcare system is HOW CAN WE MAKE A PROFIT FROM THAT. Don’t fuck around with our profits.
I agree with the others’ sentiment that you need to be your own advocate (or be fortunate to have a loved one ego can do it) in order to get the best healthcare results.
That goes for all healthcare systems, and our horrid system in the US makes it even more necessary, not less.
True, but imo living in a broken and profit-maximising healthcare system should not serve as an excuse for permitting yourself to make shitty life choices. The situation op described would have been irresponsible wherever they lived.
We should all eat healthy within our means. We all should exercise as much as possible. We all should do our best to not get sick or injured in the first place - which imo includes not getting filleted by our friends.
Exactly. Personal accountability is important regardless of the system. Expecting a healthcare system to be a safety net for irresponsibility is madness.
I need to see how cool the scar is before I can properly judge if it was stupid or cool.
Um…the American Healthcare system can be a pain, but that was the least of your problems in that scenario.
Wicked story! That healthcare system is just insane.
Did you bring your arm with you?
Wife is bringing it in. I told her not to bother but you know how they are… worry worry worry.
What about your other arm? Where is it?
Oh I forgot to tell her about that one…shhh it’s ok I’m fine. I don’t think I even need to be here.
hacks off limb
Wife: You should go to the ER.
Me: Nah, it’ll grow back.
Damn lizard people not even bothering to hide it anymore, smh.
It was appendicitis. 24h of pain. Had started rupturing.
I thought it was constipation.(in my defense, neither my obgyn wife nor the emergency doctor on the phone were sure because I had precisely zero of the usual symptoms)
Synchronicity. I was have a conversation today with someone who’d been a nurse in rural NSW. Who was saying that they knew shit was about to hit the fan when a farmer rocked up on his own in AED.
@dglaucomflecken on YouTube /tiktok has some great bits on rural med. You can tell his rotations must have hit hard.
Err… What’s an AED over there? Over here that stands for automated external defibrillator.
Accident and Emergency Department
As a former husband who got talked into going - more than once, can confirm.
That, or when a horse girl says she’s in pain. There is never any unfounded whinge from horse girl.
A horse rider I know once had to get an x-ray. They asked him when he broke his neck, since they couldn’t find any notes about it. He didn’t know he had broken it.
Best he can tell, it was from a fall a few years earlier. He spent 6 months grumbling about how slow it was to heal at his age. All the while, 1 wrong twist and his spinal cord could have been cut.
I had a very similar experience except I knew about the fall in question that caused it. Got bucked off into a water trough, back-down, and hit my neck on the side of it.
I have a vertebrae that is split vertically through the dorsal. It healed split open, such that the dorsal now forms a fork. The x-ray folks who found it were like uhmmmmmmmm so when did you break your neck?
Happened when I was like 13, didn’t know it broke, but apparently very lucky I didn’t die. But it’s the only bone I’ve ever broken so that’s fun and interesting!
That’s terrifying. Internal decapitation is one of those “wait stop I don’t need to know this” facts.
Can confirm. Sister ist a horse girl. She broke her toe once and tried to tough it out until she fainted from the pain.
From a toe!?
Sister-in-law has 5 horses. One of them kicked her in the leg, probably cracked the bone. She kept working on the farm for the rest of the week. Couldnt even wear pants anymore because it was so swollen.
Grandpa wasn’t a horse girl but he did grow up on a farm. In Soviet Estonia.
Later on in life he had a more sedentary job, but that didn’t stop him from 1) simply making his own splinter using some random sticks when he broke his toe and 2) finding out he’d had at least one, possibly more heart attacks previously when he finally went to the doctor for a really bad case of pneumonia.
And those are just things that happened in the time I was a conscious human being, he wasn’t any less stubborn in his youth.
Did I mention healthcare is free here?
Farm people are built different.
Edit: oh, a bonus fact I completely forgot about, he broke that toe on the dancefloor, in his 60s.
Dragging themselves up on the tractor, this field isn’t gonna disk itself.
I remember my mom washing her immersion blender. She always left it plugged in and turned it on in the dish water, so the blades get clean. One day, she was trying to wash the cap at the same time and caught her index in the immersion blender. She turned down my advice to go to the ER, she rather had me tape the finger. It was of no use, gauze would just instantly get soaked and started dripping blood. But she still didn’t feel the need to go to the ER because “that will heal, I had worse”.
Spoiler alert, when she couldn’t sleep that night because of throbbing pain, she asked me to take her to the ER. They were pretty mad at her and asked her why she didn’t come instantly. 6 stitches and a load of antibiotics.
It took me three reads to realize it says “dish water” and not misspelled dish washer.
I thought it said dish washer until I read this comment. I was imagining the immersion blender plugged in with the dishwasher door closed on the cord. Then I was like how did she get her hand in a running dishwasher?
I read those kind of injuries with stick blenders are pretty common. I always unplug since I learned that.
I might pulse it in water a few times to clean mine, but there’s no way I am putting my fingers anywhere near the sharp end while the head is plugged into the motor, let alone while it’s plugged into the wall.
jfc even my shitty cheap immersion blender has detachable blades
In her defence, I have no idea when I should go to the ER. I am pretty clumsy and do a lot of cooking, so am forever stabbing myself.
I often wonder to myself at what point I would need assistance.
If you apply what is close to a tourniquet and it still bleeds through, that’s a pretty strong indicator that you might want to get someone to look at it.
But I shouldn’t complain, I’m the same in that sense. I had a scratch wound from a fall (tripped drunk on the stairs when a friend was over) and constantly itched my leg and scratched off the scab. Got a nasty infection. At first it started to hurt in the evening, I went to bed and it was okay the morning. Then it wasn’t okay next morning, but manageable. I finally went to the ER when it got so bad that I had to lie on the couch the whole day and would almost black out from pain when getting up to go to the toilet. I’ve never gotten an official diagnosis, but from the pictures, I strongly lean towards strep infection. 3 weeks of penicillin and a stern lecture from the doc and I was right as rain, albeit the skin on my leg looks a bit different now lol
Oh I’ve never got close to needing a tourniquet, but it seems like there is a line somewhere in the middle that looks like it’s probably ok but should actually be seen by a professional.
The best thing you can do for yourself and those around you is take a first aid course. They are usually cheap or free through your local community college or community education programs, you can get a certification, and it will teach you when you need to seek assistance, and when you can handle it yourself. It’ll also teach you what’s worth keeping in a first aid kit, like butterfly sutures, and what isn’t (those pre-made kits are junk).
Everyone should take a first aid course. It should be done every 5 years ideally, if only because you’ll hardly ever use it, and recommendations do change.
So, if you can find somewhere, give everyone you know the gift of lifesaving knowledge! (As in arrange for them all to take the course with you, you all get the info and a nice bonding exercise. Make all the jokes about when it’ll be needed on you because you are a klutz)
Who knows, you or one of your friends/family may save a life someday!
I’ve done multiple first aid courses over my life. I’ve learnt CPR, abdominal thrusts, and even did an outdoor first aid course where they taught us how to keep people alive when help was 24 hours away. I’ve been taught how to dress wounds, but the assumption for all of these was that someone is in imminent need of help. There was nothing (that I remember) about how deep of a cut requires a visit to the emergency room.
Though you raise a good point, the last course I did was 15 years ago, I should probably do a refresher.
I think for cuts there’s general rules for location, depth, and length to qualify as an emergency. Deep punctures/stab wounds should always be treated as emergencies, do not remove the object, but stabilize it so it doesn’t cause more damage. An amount of blood equivalent to a can of soda is life threatening.
I’ve stayed current on first aid certifications for about a decade and grew up with a parent in the medical field. I still suck at knowing when something requires an er visit, quite possibly because family, friends, and neighbors would come over and get stitches on our kitchen counter rather than go to the hospital. The best I can say is, if you are questioning whether something requires a hospital visit, then it probably does. Better to be safe than sorry.
Ah, the US. Can’t teach wound care, csnt afford stitches.
I’m not in the US, but I’m also not sure when in my life I should have been taught when to seek help.
If every visit to the ER wasn’t a potential bankruptcy waiting to happen, you would have been able to learn
Going to the ER is free for me in terms of money, but I have better ways to spend my time.
I’m in Europe, I once was in a pretty bad state and with a high fever, so I called 112 or something like that, because in other country they decide if you should go to hospital immediately and deliver you. Here they questioned me and told me ‘yeah, you should go to ER’, and the conversation was over. I took a taxi there, not sure what would I do if I passed out before getting to the taxi, as I already passed out that evening and it was why I called and didn’t just go in the first place.
112 means you’re a ghost
In Celsius? You’re cooked!
Edit: 112 is a common emergency services # in the EU, akin to 911, for any Americans wondering
Oh, y’all don’t do 999 like the Brits? (I always thought that was a little too easy to go by accident tbh)
But yeah 112f so eleventry-seveen Celsius. (44.5 according to a unit converter)
According to the wiki, 112 is technically possible but unlikely
The highest recorded body temperature recorded in a patient who survived hyperthermia is 46.5 °C (115.7 °F
40/104 is considered a life threatening emergency
I’m German. I’ve had 40 hours of first aid education total in my life, and I work in IT.
One course in school, one as part of driver’s education, one for my first job in food delivery, and one while volunteering at a youth center.I’ve done multiple first aid courses over my life. There was nothing (that I remember) about how deep of a cut requires a visit to the emergency room. Every course started with the assumption that someone was in need of immediate assistance, but comments here imply an emergency room visit is needed for bad cuts even if it’s not immediately life threatening.
Good job! I took outdoor emergency care so I could volunteer for ski patrol when I was 16. It was harder than any class I had years later in university.
I recently had what might have been a heart attack and laid down in bed instead of going to the ER. (I’m pretty sure it wasn’t, but maybe.) Everyone to whom I’ve mentioned it has gotten upset with me. My doctor was especially expressive about it.
That’s also the life hack to getting treatment though, be it male or female. Always say your partner made you go in.
I found another hack.
Bleed from the nose for over an hour, then go into the ER with a mixing bowl full of your blood under your face. Scare the security guard and get instant admittence. It worked for me! I didn’t even get to the reception desk before I was admitted. Seriously.
This person knows how to game the system^^
I was in this exact situation two days ago.
Me too. I didn’t want to go in, but it was my sister who said “you’re injured. Sit the queue like a big boy.”
And so I did. And the first antibiotic and anti-protozoa mix left me vomiting aggressively. So I sat the queue again. The second mix, doxy+metro, is much gentler and I’m able to keep food down.
Only 4, then 6 hours in A+E. Drugs on extended health coverage, $0 ultimately. 🇨🇦
Hope you are doing better.
Did you survive?
Spent 24 hrs in emerg. Now at home confined to bed. Getting better thanks.
Geez, I hope so. I want to know how it goes on.
Lmao, didn’t check usernames and thought you are OP. Hilarious response it would have been.
Op hasnt responded, which is a concern.
Oh no, I just noticed that their username itself is a cry for help
Quick! Someone in Canada go check on OP!
Hey Sam, you fucking asshole, how about listening to the patient independent of their marital status?
You can also listen to people independently and also recognize the pattern of, “Spouse made me come in” generally ended in higher acuity.
Quit looking for reasons to be angry man. It’s a joke and it wasn’t even insinuating what you’re trying to accuse it of.
It seems to be insinuating exactly what I’m saying, that doctors are dismissive ignorant assholes.
And here I was thinking this was a humorous observation based on the stereotype that men don’t like going to the doctor.
What the hell is even that
This guy’s a fraud. It’s the fucking ED.
ER where i live.
Are you one of those posts I see were anything outside America doesn’t exist?
And yeh last live i said my wife made me come in i ended in a ward for a month with an iv hooked to me. Time before that I landed in surgery.
tbh IDK anywhere in the US that calls it ED, that’s always meant ‘erectile dysfunction’ around here
I worked in hospitals across a large part of the US for years, everyone who works in a hospital calls it ED if they’re talking to another worker.
Well, he did say it was the “fucking ED”.
… I can’t argue with that.
