Make Your Choice. There Are Only Two.

Look, lady.  Your husband is not in good shape.  That's probably why you called EMS in the first place.  You recognized that something is really wrong.  He needs a nurse to take care of him that has no other patients, or, at the most, one other patient.  In other words, he needs to be in an ICU.

The nurses up there are very well trained in monitoring and taking care of critical patients.  You know who isn't?  The Med/Surg nurses.  Don't get me wrong, I appreciate everything the Med/Surg nurses do.  And some of them are very good nurses.  But they aren't trained or equipped to handle a patient as critical as your husband.

Guess what else?  He's definitely not staying in the ER.  We each have at least four patients.  And many of them need serious interventions and care.  Nobody in the ER has the time to sit on one or two critical patients for very long before kicking them up to the ICU.  That's what we're good at.  We stabilize.  Then we punt.  We're very good at that, especially in our ER (in my humble opinion), but we aren't an ICU.

So, remember when we said your husband needs to be in an ICU?  Well, all that is why.  Well, unfortunately, we've had some seriously shitty days recently.  That means we've had a lot of really critical patients coming in.  That means our ICU is completely full.  Sorry, can't help that one.

If you want him to live, he needs to be transferred to another hospital with an ICU bed available.

That means you have two choices:

1) Let your husband go (not that we wouldn't do our best to keep that from happening, but we don't have the manpower).

2) Let us transfer him down the road to another hospital so that he can receive the care he deserves. 

That's it. . . Now, choose. . .