I think I’ve got everything settled down from Monday’s update hiccup. Just need to figure out a way to put the notice/title back on the transcript so people know about Director Commentary.
By the way, click the transcript button below here for Director Commentary. XD
While I am housecleaning anyway, I decided to remove the two lowest-performing boxes of Project Wonderful ads to reduce some of the visual clutter. I want to continue keeping some PW means available on the site for Pay It Forward reasons, but having four boxes of PW ads plus my three Google ads is overkill.
The nameless couple stuck in Waiting Room Hell are loosely based off two customers from the store I work at. Very loosely.
To be fair, I can’t blame the guy. Also that grey background is perfect for the hospital waiting room experience.
he needs to learn to get an appointment
The tear tattoo is something he most likely got in prison. That doesn’t make him a bad person. And yes, the tear tattoo does mean that he’s killed some one. HOWEVER, it being filled in means he also regrets having killed whomever it was (it could have even been an accident).
I’m not so sure about that clubs tattoo on back of his head, though.
If the woman did not use foul language they might see her sooner. :p
So, do smilies not work on this “update”, or does it just not like the “sticking your tongue out”? ‘Cause they’ve always worked before. 😀
Well that last one worked, might just be the 😛 smiley.
Huh. Capital P works but not lowercase, apparently.
Been there, done that. While I was living in California my Ex was suffering from horrible, horrible headaches, so badly she would vomit. So we went to the emergency room.
I don’t know WHAT was going on at that hospital, but the room was PACKED full and there was some really horrible injuries there.
One guy had been shot in the face and they just gave him a rag to put over it until a doctor could see him, he was getting blood in his eyes and bleeding horribly.
Another guy had a really bad brown recluse bite, on his chest, near his heart and I guess he had been there for 8 hours. His girlfriend started freaking out and demanded to see a doctor or something and the person at the desk called the cops and had them both escorted out.
I don’t know about their area, but if they had been there for “hours” it may have been a good idea to go to another county. We have a hospital in our area, but if need be, we also have clinics in the area and a hour drive to Green Bay would yield even more hospitals.
They can escort people out of the hospital before they get treatment? Yeesh…
Oh, it gets better, I worked an eight hour shift before they finally saw her. I had to get a Taxi and go to work and leave her alone.
Also she wasn’t getting reception at the hospital, so for eight hours I couldn’t call her and I had no idea what was going on.
They did a spinal tap on her to see if they could discover anything via that route and apparently they let a new person do it “for practice” and they ended up hitting a nerve with the needle and it hurt like hell and the tips of her toes were numb for about 6 weeks after.
Oh god, yeeuch. I’ve been the Practice Dummy before when donating plasma The newbie hit a vein wall and collappsed it, and after struggling to get a fit my left arm went numb and they had to unhook me move me to a new unit and re-connect me so an experienced tech could stick my other arm. It’s no botched spinal tap but it still sssuuuucked.
Well of course the police would need the right to escort people out of hospitals if necessary. Otherwise, patients with “accidentally self-inflicted” wounds could threaten to get violent just to move up the line for treatment, then figure out just how soon they need to sneak out to avoid arrest.
You’d end up with public hospitals needing to have jail-like security.
Ugh I didn’t think of that but I can totally see it happening.
Hospitals always seem to have a long queue. Not really much they can do, although sometimes it does seem a bit pointless going. By the time my younger brother got his lip glued back together, it had stopped bleeding anyway. The glue fell out the next day, and he was completely fine. Hospitals A&Es in the summer holidays seem to be absolutely packed with injured children like him.
Dang, I was going to comment on the guy with all the prison tats (see a ton of those at my work too, but it’s a courthouse, so it isn’t that unexpected) and how he’s got that “look at me, I murdered 2 people” tear-drop thing, but the hospital waiting room stories broke my concentration. Emergency rooms are the worst.
Yeah, I noticed his “teardrop” too – and knew its meaning – so I was thinking ‘serves you right for being a ____ who actually wants to advertise he’s a soulless killer.’
For all we know, the guy got the tattoo not because he’s a killer, but because he wants people to *think* he’s a killer.
Incidentally, I’m rather pleased that this aggressive, much-tattooed skinhead has a *black* girlfriend. Racism isn’t much of a feature here, looks like.
That’s always a possibility, and it wouldn’t be the first time someone’s tried it. Plus, he is concerned for his lady-friend, so that’s a point for him (who knows, maybe all his thug-days are behind him, and he just has to live with the physical reminders of his previous decisions, despite his current circumstances)
Now, if he had something like “white power” across his forehead, that’d be a bit different (ooh, the 2 kill for the tear were people attacking him/his lady-friend, and it was self defense…making a flavorful backstory for Tattoo-guy here)
I thought it might be a catch-phrase, “club two-death”
Somebody else knows its meaning! So happy.
You advertise that you’ve already killed a person in prison so that the other prisoners are less likely to fuck with you (or literally fuck you). May not always work, but probably cuts down on the hassling.
Tattoos sometimes outlast prison terms, however. Obviously he’s out now.
To be fair to the Smiths, they were there to see a specific doctor, who was expecting them. The sooner they get there and get done, the quicker everyone else can be seen.
That was my thought– they made an appointment for a specific problem with a specific doctor, who probably doesn’t usually work ER in the first place.
A little odd that they’d enter through the emergency department when a Doctor in a ward is expecting them, but eh. Creative license?
So glad our hospitals don’t get that bad – although when you have to wait, it’s not because they’re busy, it’s because they’re bedblocked. You can’t see patients in emergency if it’s full, and you can’t empty it without admitting them to the wards, and if the wards are full… you can have doctors standing around with nothing to do while people wait and wait and wait. Have to send ambulances away.
Not necessarily creative license–at our hospital, admitting for all departments, including emergency, is handled at one desk.
Of course, our hospital is just a *little* smaller than the one Selkie’s at…
And as for the coughing woman in the waiting room, obviously I’m just guessing but she’s part of the problem. She doesn’t seem to have an emergent condition. One problem we have is people going to emergency because they can’t be bothered getting an appointment to see a GP. It frustrates the heck out of the emergency doctors who are trained for more than prescribing bed rest and antibiotics, and it delays care for actual emergencies.
Haven’t had to try it myself yet, but I was told that Emergency Rooms have to treat you, regardless of your finances or lack thereof, unlike regular doctors you have to have an appt to see. Furthermore, coughs can be symptomatic of some very nasty illnesses that do kill people – tuberculosis and pneumonia for two examples. If someone is poor enough to have to do the Emergency Room route, a cough very well might be a sign of larger underlying problems compared to somebody who has enough money to eat well and sees their doctor regularly.
In the US that is true. Here a lot of people don’t have health insurance (despite the supposed public healthcare for which Obama has been fighting). If you have a valid medical problem that requires treatment, you can go to an ER and get medical help no matter whether you have insurance and/or can pay or not. The ER is not allowed to turn you away. They also cannot force you to pay for treatment if you cannot afford it (although they CAN try really, really hard and it can be a major pain in the rear to prove you can’t afford to pay).
I’ve been lucky enough to not have to go to the ER many times but I’ve always had to wait hours. ERs in this country are almost always under-staffed and overwhelmed. If someone who was shot in the face had to wait it was probably because there were tons of people who had been stabbed in the heart (or something) ahead of him. In my experience, most ER employees aren’t a-holes but overworked, underpaid, and operating in a constant state of low-grade trauma.
(Source: extensive medical experience of my own, a mom and several friends of the family who worked in the trauma unit at a city ER, personal research into the operating budget of several NYC hospitals.)
And yes, if you have an appointment to see someone specific at the hospital you go in ahead of others. Doctors sometimes do this when there is an emergency outside of their office hours and/or the patient needs care beyond the equipment in their personal office. Usually that only happens in very serious cases, like Selkie’s.
Haha sorry I’m overposting. Very opinionated on the subject. It occurs to me that they might already be treating her with what we call “the therapeutic wait”. It works very well on coughs and colds.
Well, here you see the advantages of making an appointment :p
[This is going to get political so I’ll apologize now.]
Meanwhile, over in England, they’re so happy with their National Health Service they did a 12 min musical salute to it in the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony. The problem here is you first have to be willing to pay taxes to get something like that up and running.
Same in Finland. Minus the Olympics. 😛
Sorry, but who in England are you referring to? Actual citizens or the government (who probably put om the performance)? My brother-in-law is English and he and my sister will be the first to tell you it’s great until you get something super serious, like cancer (both his parents had it and are dead) or a bad sonogram (they told my sister she may have to abort what turned out to be a healthy normal baby). A friend from Canada says the same thing. It’s a wonderful and necessary idea (really the alternative of people going into debt over medical costs is wrong), but it is not a perfect solution. Unless you live somewhere like France. They supposedly have it right.
Like anything else you get out of it what you put into it. Britain, like the rest of the world, was hit by the market meltdown so funding for the NHS could not keep up with the usage rates and the approval ratings show the results: “Public satisfaction with the NHS remained broadly stable in 2012 after a record fall in ratings the previous year, the British Social Attitudes Survey revealed today. The poll, published by the King’s Fund think-tank, found that 61% of people were satisfied with the NHS, compared with 58% in 2011 and 70% in 2010.”
Really? Because my uncle and his sister and her husband are all British and any time they need anything more than regular care, they get on a plane and head back to Jolly Olde. And shall we even get into the hypocrisy of Sarah Palin? Whatever you may think of her and her politics, it’s a fact that she’s opposing universal care here while admitting that her family routinely crossed into Canada to get free care when she was younger.
I’m a US citizen and from here the NHS looks pretty good. [Getting up on political soapbox now – sorry!] According to CNN and the National Census Bureau, something like 50 million Americans are uninsured. The cost of healthcare in this country is ridiculous. I’ve serious medical problems – serious as in “would be dead if not for modern medicine” – and have run up hundreds of thousands of dollars of healthcare over about two decades. There is NO WAY I’d be able to get that care without health insurance.
Why do I have health insurance when so many people don’t? Simple – I was “lucky” to be born white to upper middle-class parents. A crazy amount of uninsured Americans are working-class/poor people of colour (like the woman waiting for care in this strip). People in my country are DYING whose lives could be saved, simply because they cannot afford to buy their own health insurance or aren’t in a position (lack of college education, job skills, racial discrimination, etc.) where they have a job that provides insurance. Even full-time gainful employment doesn’t guarantee health insurance. The latest thing many companies have done to combat Obama’s universal healthcare plan is to unilaterally cut full-time employees’ hours to just below where healthcare is legally required. (Starbucks just made the news here for publicly announcing their refusal to follow this route.)
It’s easy to get mad at the medical profession for “making” healthcare too expensive but doctors and other medical professionals don’t get paid nearly as much as the general public thinks. It’s almost impossible to get through medical school in this country without crippling student loans unless you’re independently wealthy (that’s a whole other rant!). Then there is malpractice insurance (you wouldn’t BELIEVE how much that costs) and high equipment and supply costs, including pharmaceutical supplies, the cost of which doctors have very little control over. That’s not even mentioning things like staff payroll and office rental.
It’s a bad system all around and, like usual in this country, if you have enough money you’ll get good care. If you don’t, tough luck for you, and don’t expect much sympathy either. (I’m thinking of the massive negative public sentiment regarding “Obamacare” and the 30+ times our Congress has tried to overturn it.)
Sorry again for the rant, but this is an issue about which I feel very strongly. (Can you tell?) 😉
First: dear Mr. Tattoo Dude, this is a multi-species hospital. If you’re too prejudiced to realize that other species get to see different doctors who aren’t as busy because there aren’t as many of that species in this area, then you can go to a nice, biologically homogeneous hospital and get the MALE SIGN FEMALE SIGN OUT OF HERE.
In all seriousness, I think he is justified in being angry, since he doesn’t know what I stated above, but all I can say is … I’ve been in your shoes, INCLUDING the fact where my condition wasn’t life threatening. Bring a book next time.
Second: FINALLY! Exposition is imminent! Dave, I commend you for your skill at weaving together your different narrative threads. It makes me automatically want the conclusion of the one we’re not on.
Oh, man. ERs Suuuuuuck, but the speed of when you’re seen depends on the one you go to. When I had minor things wrong (painful, but minor) and went to a smaller suburban hospital I was seen in no time. When I was taken in by an AMBULANCE I waited for over 8 hours, by which time most of my symptoms had dissipated, and ended up being seen by an UrgentCare doctor who basically shrugged and told me (paraphrased) “Fuck if I know, but it’s probably not cancer.” To this day do not know what caused my “anti-seizure” (I was convulsing on the floor, but was aware during the whole thing so it wasn’t a seizure so I call it the anti-seizure). OH! and when I was brought in by the paramedics and orderly did some kind of test and called me a liar when I couldn’t stand.
It absolutely depends on which you go to… as well as time of day and day of week. When I had Serious Medical Thing I went to Cook County hospital and cooled my heels for 8 hours before being seen, in a place that had no bathrooms with running water. When my husband had Serious Medical Issue & went to Cook County, he waited 8 hours before being seen and then got stashed in a bed in a hallway because there were no rooms. When we went to the ER in a fancy mostly-white upper middle class suburb after a minor fender bender, my husband and I waited 20 minutes tops before being seen and then were offered all kinds of drugs.
There is a huge disparity in speed and quality of treatment based on where you go for that treatment. There is also a pretty big disparity in how much you actually pay.
Most ERs prioritize folks in ambulances, though. It super sucks you had a wait that long. I can’t imagine how long the folks who came in via foot or car had to wait. Yiiiiikes.
Nasty little symbol in the first dialog balloon, there…
totally subtle too >.>
This is actually a great thought on hospitals. Selkie appears to have the same disease as the poor woman, but is actually dying. Been in waiting rooms for hours, but usually didn’t notice others before me looking the same or better of. Then again, I was usually too much in pain (or busy trying not to bleed all over) to notice much of anything.
Selkie’s not dying. Just want to clarify that. 🙂
This is why I’m glad I never get sick. I’ve waited at hospitals with family before and luckily the wait wasn’t to bad. Mostly cause the clinic we go to has our family doctor and he tends to get to us rather quick.
I do feel bed for the nameless couple.
When my mom broke her wrist, we were in the ER for several hours. The guy in the room next to us came in about when we did with a badly cut finger. We waited quietly, but we could hear them yelling about how they needed to be seen, how horrible the service was, etc. The doctor came to them, said “put a bandaid on it, come back and see me Monday,” and left.
Mom got taken back for x-rays as soon as the doctor came in, she got a cast on, and we left well taken care of.
Point being, while I do understand Nameless Couple’s pain, they might want to be careful how they treat the hospital staff.
Hm. To be fair, their statements pretty much say that Selkie’s family has an appointment. It’s kind of dumb to get mad over someone who has a appointment getting in before someone who doesn’t.
So I just got got back from a movie night with some family. We watched Breakfast Club and watching how the principal openly threatens a student with assault, breaks into confidential files, then blows off supervising the students to have beer with the janitor.. I think my principal and John Hughe’s principal need to form a bowling league of jerks or something.
Interesting hairstyle. It looks like a club from a deck of cards. Can we call him “Club-head”?
just wanted to let you know I was getting an ad with women wearing very revealing clothing advertising for clubbing style clothing on your comic. It doesn’t bother me at all, but you seem like you are going for family friendly here so I thought I’d give you a heads up. I took a screen shot if you want to see it.
I saw it earlier, thank you.
Some people don’t understand triage. Or not using the emergency room as a GP. My family’s main stints in the emergency room have been gashed open leg (18 stitches), broken wrist, car accident (whiplash and they thought at first I’d broken something in my neck) and my brother smashing his head on a rock and knocking out a tooth plus a concussion.
Coughs and colds go to the doctor. And if you have no alternative because you have no healthcare, then that is part of what is wrong with my country. *sigh*
Curious about where some of y’all live, where the ER is free. “Going to the ER because you have no healthcare so can’t afford to go to a GP” – sure sounds like the ER is free, to me.
Every time I’ve been, they ask me about insurance. Last two times I went to the ER were job-related, and workman’s comp handled it. But the time before that, I was handed a bill for 800 dollars.
It isn’t free, if you can’t pay it it goes into collections and trashes your credit score until you get around to taking care of it. In the long run it’s far more costly to do the ER route but if you can’t get treatment any other way, it’s what you’re stuck with. I have a $300 one I haven’t paid up on yet thanks to an idiot running a stop sign and work (drove truck at the time) requiring I get an immediate drug test to prove I wasn’t at fault that they didn’t tell me wasn’t covered by their insurance policies.
The real annoyance of that was that my partner (we ran as a team) was driving when it happened and I STILL had to have the wretched test done. Was seriously not amused when I got that bill.
Rye, if you are still dealing with this, make a HUGE pest of yourself to both the hospital and the insurance company. It’s standard policy for many health insurance companies to automatically reject all claims whether they are required to cover them or not (it saves them money). Keep calling and insisting that the medical care needs to be covered. At the same time, write letters/send emails to the hospital. Submit paystubs and things like mortgage statements and utility bills to show that you cannot pay. I had to do this when I was an undergrad existing on dorm food and work-study. I had to go to the hospital and my health insurance refused to pay for about $500 of it, which I did not have. It took a long time and was a HUGE inconvenience, but the bill eventually got forgiven and my credit rating didn’t even suffer that much.
(I just realized I am assuming you are located in the US here. If not, my apologies!)
I will also refrain from going off on a rant about health insurance companies in the US because I don’t want to start smashing things tonight. *ugh*
No, like Rye said, it’s still not free. But they can’t refuse to take you like a doctor’s office can.
there have been many times I have gone to the hospital for pain right where your appendix is and they took 3 hours before they would see me, if it had been an appendix it could have burst. Also I was have a sezier for 5 hours waiting in the hospital after being taken in an amblance and they sent me home soon after seeing me saying it was all in my head after doing an EEG instead of an EKG like they where suppose to. They sent my best friend home saying she was fine when she in fact had a gal balder infection that nearly killed her.
Uh…wouldn’t an EEG be the most probable test of choice over an EKG for seizures? An EKG/ECG test for seizures is probably only going to show something if you’re having seizures because of some problem with your heart. Unless you had a reason to suspect something with your heart, wouldn’t an EEG be the most logical choice?
Yay! First ever comment on a Selkie Comic! Anyways, I wonder when page 367 is gonna be released.
To my understanding, USA is one of the only developed nations in the world that still DOESN’T have a government-funded healthcare system.
What does club-head think his taxes have to do with this for-profit hospital?