Last November, I found myself wedged between a rolling partition and a wall in the corner of NYU Langone’s pediatric emergency room. On the other side of the divider, a young woman was crying out in pain from a possibly infected appendix. She was on the phone, and we were close enough that I could hear the other end of the conversation. The two of us were sandwiched into a single bay — a doorless cupboard that might pass for a bedroom in particularly coveted areas of Manhattan — and there was only one set of supplies and machines for the presence of two patients. Nurses had hooked me up to the bay’s one monitor, given me the one blood pressure cuff, and chose to monitor my breathing instead of the breathing of the woman who was headed any minute to emergency surgery. It was only later that I learned we were in pediatrics. This was notable because not only were we not pediatric patients, but there wasn’t a child in sight.
When it became clear that I needed to be admitted, we were told beds were scarce. Though the hospital had just opened a 374-bed, $1.4 billion wing, that building was already at full capacity. So was the cardiac unit — the place where I belonged — in the main building. Days before during a routine check-up with my cardiologist, it became clear that the heart failure which I live with had worsened recently, filling my lungs with fluid and making it difficult to breathe. The typical remedy would be an increase in one of my daily medications, something easy enough to do at home, but I have a history of arrhythmias which the drug exacerbates through its lowering of nutrients. Bloodwork showed those levels to already be low, meaning that changing any dosage required a matching change in supplements or else my heart would certainly trigger a dangerous tachycardia. The only solution, then, was a supervised admission where my doctor could slowly and safely adjust the dosages over a period of days. Despite coordinating the trip with my cardiologist and coming at her request, the only thing the hospital could offer was to keep me in the emergency department for at least 48 hours.
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