Positive reaction to Union Hospital

LYNN – I have visited Union Hospital’s emergency room several times, but last Thursday was the first time I walked into the Lynnfield Street facility in severe pain and desperate for medical help.A bad reaction to penicillin early Thursday evening drained my body of fluids in just over an hour. By 9 p.m., I was sitting in a wheelchair in the ER, periodically doubled over and moaning, while my wife answered the admitting nurse’s questions. In short, I was the patient who everyone else in the ER gives wide berth.A cramp seized my left thigh by the time I was brought to a bed in one of the ER bays. The nurses decided I needed fluids and stuck an intravenous needle in my arm before pumping what would be the first of two units of solution into my body.For the next six hours, with my wife, Mary, sitting beside me, I dozed or lay half awake, gradually feeling better and slowly getting a feel for the nocturnal rhythm of a place devoted, around the clock – no closing on holidays – to making people feel better.Last Thursday was not my first time as a hospital patient, and I know what it feels like to surrender freedom and self-responsibility – if even briefly – into the hands of strangers who are trained to eliminate pain, fix problems and restore health.Being hospitalized means spending hours on your back – a posture that reduces vision to a secondary role behind hearing. Because I could only see just beyond the curtain enclosing my bay Thursday night, I had to rely on what I heard to satisfy my curiosity about what was going on around me in the ER as Thursday slipped into Friday morning.I heard the occasional commotion of medical workers calming someone down or convincing them to follow a specific instruction. I heard quick conversations between doctors and nurses putting their heads together to figure out a medical challenge.But mostly I heard clipped, cheerful exchanges between people who are part of a team, part of a committed effort to take any problem rolling through the ER’s sliding doors and solve it. All through the night until I was released at 3 a.m., I heard nurses, doctors, janitors, paramedics, police officers and a host of other people I will never meet and never know what they do ask one another how they were doing and consult quickly – sometimes at length – on the health of the people lying in the bays around me.As I lay on my narrow bed under two heavy sheets with an IV in my arm, I realized there are thousands of ERs, like Union’s, that never close. They are places where people work on holidays, they work night shifts and they skip family events or trips when they can’t get someone to cover for them.I lay there grateful to be able to get help and feel better. I was also thankful that going to the emergency room did not mean driving to Salem or somewhere else outside of Lynn. Union’s emergency room has been at the center of Lynn residents’ concerns since even before Partners HealthCare announced in November 2013 that it had major plans to revamp services provided at Union.Not much has been said about Union Hospital’s future since February, when a state high court rejected Partners’ plans for a region-wide care reconfiguration, but a Partners executive told Lynn Area Chamber of Commerce members last December that “reconfiguring of services” for Union Hospital makes sense even if the court rejected Partners’ megaplan.The only help I wanted from America’s health care system last Thursday at 9 p.m. was relief from severe stomach pain and dehydration. But what I got before I left Union’s ER early Friday morning was a demonstration of why Union Hospital and the great people who work in it need to stay in Lynn and keep providing a full range of health care services for local residents.Thanks to everyone who helped me Thursday night.