Dans Hamptons

It all started one slippery Saturday in January. I was filling the birdfeeders at the Quogue Wildlife Refuge when I noticed that the corncob in the squirrel feeder was picked clean. I grabbed a fresh ear of corn, yanked the old one off the nail, and jammed the new cob onto it. And then my finger went numb.

Being cold and wet, I didn’t think much of it until I looked at my purple, swollen finger and the clear liquid coming out of the wound. At that point, I did what any grown-up girl would do in such a situation and called my mother, who told me that if I didn’t get a tetanus shot within the next fifteen minutes, I would die.

Thinking my window of time must be a little bit longer than that, I closed up shop at four p.m. as usual and set out to find someone to give me a tetanus shot. I was trying to make the Jitney later that evening and had some errands to run, so I decided to drop by my local doctor’s office. I pulled into the driveway at the Peconic Family Medicine only to find them closed. Next stop: Southampton Hospital’s Westhampton Beach satellite clinic. After a quick five-minute drive, I walked into the clinic and saw a receptionist at the desk — a good sign. I told her about my finger and asked for a tetanus shot. She calmly told me that the clinic had closed at four (it was four-fifteen) and that I would have to drive either to Southampton Hospital or the hospital in Riverhead. “Please,” I begged, “I stabbed myself on a rusty nail!” At that point, I was being ignored as another woman who had come into the closed clinic for some test results and was promptly helped. “Which one is closer?” I asked. “They’re about the same,” she replied. I decided to take my chances at Riverhead. “How do I get to the hospital in Riverhead?”

“Just drive straight down this road, past the airport and you should see it.”

It sounded easy enough, so I got back in my car and drove straight down the road to look for the hospital. I continued to drive until I saw a sign for Riverhead. I still didn’t see the hospital, so I took a right on the main drag, where I finally saw a blue sign with an H, pointing straight ahead. I kept driving in that direction, with my eyes peeled for any sign of a hospital, and although I saw many medical clinics (all closed) there was no hospital in sight. Soon, I was taking a twilight tour of Long Island’s beautiful wine country with a painful purple finger raised off of the steering wheel. At 5 p.m., I turned around, knowing that Southampton Hospital’s Emergency Room was my last and only hope, before I succumbed to an all but imminent death from tetanus.

When I arrived at the hospital, it was 6 p.m. I walked into the Emergency Room and was told to sit and wait for a Triage nurse. I waited for about twenty minutes and saw the nurse, who asked what was wrong with me, then sat me in the main waiting room. “The doctor will see you in just a minute,” she assured me. At 6:30 p.m., my name was called. I was on my way to health! I was given a plastic identity bracelet and told to sit down. I asked the woman at the desk when I would be taken care of. “Right away” she said. At 8:30 p.m., I was feeling a little woozy from the fluorescent lights and not having eaten or drunk anything in hours and I walked up to the desk and asked if there was a soda machine in the hospital. “Hah! That would be nice,” the woman at the desk answered.

At this point I realized that every single person in this waiting room had been sitting there since I arrived. In the three hours that I had been there, no one had been helped. At 9 p.m., with my finger back to being numb and my head throbbing with a migraine headache, I decided to call it quits. I took off my bracelet, put it on the counter and told the lady at the desk that I was leaving. Having missed the last Jitney into the city and not having accomplished my task, I drove home, took some Advil and went to sleep.

The next morning, I researched tetanus and found that as long as I got the shot within two days of the exposure, I should be all right. I called my doctor in the city and asked if I could come in for a tetanus shot. She couldn’t believe that no one on Long Island could help me and suggested I try the local clinics again on Monday. I called Peconic Family Medicine hoping for a miracle. They told me that, in order to establish myself as a patient, I would need to pay them $150 for an appointment, plus the cost of the shot and the administration thereof. So I went into the city, got my shot, and was back in the Dan’s Papers office by lunchtime.

Before this whole debacle started, my mother had suggested going to the veterinary clinic for the shot, and although it sounded like a ridiculous suggestion at the time, I might have had better luck at the vet than I did at Southampton Hospital or the other places. So why is it that if you get hurt on Saturday evening in the Hamptons, you could drive in to New York City, go to a doctor there, and drive back in the time it takes to see a doctor here? Of course, in the emergency room, they prioritize injuries and mine wasn’t really that serious. But if an entire room full of people were prioritized as “not that serious,” then what was the staff of Southampton Hospital doing while we were all waiting?

This week, I heard that Southampton Hospital is taking the state’s suggestion and removing beds to try to make the hospital more efficient. I wonder if it will be more efficient, or if it will just mean that it is going to take that much longer to receive care. Perhaps they should be adding doctors and nurses to tend to the patients who would be in the excess beds instead. In any case, if I ever need medical care, I’ll take my chances navigating the LIE over the waiting room at Southampton Hospital any day.