I wrote about the changes at Jane Phillips, then ended up in its ER

Two weeks ago, I wrote one of our most widely read and shared articles at The Wiley Post. It was about the changes being made at our one and only hospital.

I sat down with Jane Phillips Medical Center President Tanner Holt for more than an hour and had one of the most honest, forthright interviews I’ve had in a long time.

Usually, someone at his level is more guarded. More corporate. More likely to speak in carefully polished phrases that have been sanded down by three departments and maybe a lawyer.

Holt was not that.

He was an open book. He answered every question I could think of, and then some.

The response to the article has been a little bit of everything. Some people said they had already noticed positive changes. Some were hopeful. Others were firmly in the “I’ll believe it when I see it” camp.

Fair enough.

One particular area of focus was the hospital’s emergency department. As Holt said, the ER is often the hospital's front door. For many people, it shapes their entire opinion of the place.

One of the things Holt said he was proud of was reducing ER wait times and improving the speed at which patients move through the system.

Well, for Father’s Day this year, I got the chance to put that claim to the test.

Lucky me.

One more data point

Before I go any further, I want to be clear: This was my personal experience.

Other people can have completely different ones — good, bad or somewhere in between. My experience does not invalidate anyone else’s. It is simply one more data point.

On Saturday, June 20, I reluctantly went to bed with a throbbing earache.

And when I say throbbing, I mean radiating pain across my face. The best way I can describe it is that it felt like someone had shoved a screwdriver into my skull just behind my ear.

So, yeah. It hurt.

My teeth hurt. My neck hurt. Basically, the whole left side of my face was angry it existed.

I took every over-the-counter medication I had in my personal pharmacy. It was the type of pain that makes a person desperate enough to Google home remedies and briefly consider whether crystals have been unfairly maligned. Nothing worked.

After lying awake in bed for four hours, hoping things would improve, they only got worse.

Finally, I lost hearing in my left ear. I woke up my wife and said, “I can’t take it anymore. I need to go to the hospital.”

On the way there, I had one thought: Well, I guess I’m about to find out if things really have changed at St. John’s.

Because I am apparently incapable of suffering like a normal person, I decided I might as well distract myself by taking mental notes and timing the whole affair.

Twenty-five minutes

I walked into the ER at 3:04 a.m.

Now the ER isn’t my first choice for something like this. If it had been during the day, I probably would have gone to an urgent care. But in the middle of the night, there is one option.

There was no one in the waiting room, and I walked right up to the window.

The woman who checked me in — I don’t know her name, because my ear was screaming — was kind, pleasant and even made a few jokes to lighten the mood. She warned me I was about to get a bunch of text messages from the hospital.

She was right. I got a lot.

Check-in took less than four minutes. Not bad. Also, I did not have to give my information 15 different times, which should count as a modern medical breakthrough.

Three minutes after checking in, I was in a bed getting my vitals checked. By 3:11 a.m. — seven minutes after my arrival — I was already hooked up to the machines.

Less than five minutes after that, I saw Dr. Zachary Ferguson.

He was calm, kind, sympathetic and exactly the kind of person you want when your eardrum feels like it’s auditioning as the timpani drum in the symphony.

Turns out, I had a wicked ear infection. Only the second one of my life. The first came after jumping off the cliffs at Osage Hills when I was in middle school.

Kids, make sure you get the water out of your ears.

Five minutes after seeing the doctor, I had meds and something for the pain. At this point, I felt we were speed-running modern medicine.

I walked out the ER doors at 3:29 a.m.

My total time there? Twenty-five minutes.

Yes, it was a lot of money for 25 minutes. But at that point, I was in so much pain that I was not thinking about the cost. I had gone in expecting to be there at least two hours, if I was lucky.

Instead, I was in and out in less time than it usually takes me to get to the examination room for a scheduled primary care appointment.

They knocked it out of the park

On top of being out in less than it takes to watch an episode of “The Pitt,” everyone was nice.

Not fake nice. In a ‘they really cared’ kind of nice.

They were efficient, gentle and respectful.

Overall, I would give the experience a 10 out of 10. Highly recommend, though preferably under less painful circumstances.

Over my life, I have probably been a patient at the Jane Phillips ER seven times. I know this was an easy diagnosis. I know I was not coming in with something complex or life-threatening, and honestly, my prognosis was overkill for an ER. And I have no idea how many patients there were.

But I will say this: They knocked it out of the park.

In past ER visits, there was always that long wait between checking in, getting a bed, seeing a nurse and finally seeing a doctor. Then came the next round of waiting — for meds, a scan, test results or discharge papers.

You know the wait. You sit there staring at the curtain, listening to footsteps in the hallway, hoping the next curtain slide is for you.

It feels a little like being on “The Bachelor,” except instead of hoping for a rose, you are hoping for antibiotics or a morphine drip.

You think, “I really thought the doctor and I connected — we shared something special.” Next, you hear the hopeful knock, then the doc talking to the patient next door, and suddenly you are wondering where it all went wrong.

That night, I never had the chance to wonder what was taking so long. They were fast, but I didn’t feel rushed — just cared for.

There was a nurse or doctor in my room for more time than I spent waiting. My wife brought a book, and she didn’t even get to crack it open.

The front door matters

When I interviewed Holt, he talked about speeding things up in the ER because he did not want patients sitting around when they could be at home, at work or simply getting on with their lives.

At the time, that sounded like a good answer from a hospital administrator.

After Sunday, I can say my experience reflected what he was talking about.

Again, this does not mean every problem at Jane Phillips is fixed. It does not mean every patient has had, or will have, the same experience I did. It does not erase the bad stories people have shared over the years.

But it does give me one real-world example that something may, in fact, be changing.

And when you are sitting in an ER at 3 a.m. with half your face trying to murder you, the change Holt talked about is the difference between a long, miserable night and getting home to rest.

That may not prove everything has changed at Jane Phillips.

But it proves something did that night.