Nightlife:Outside the East Georgia Regional Medical Center Emergency Room. Photo By Ashley Reed

Story by Ashley Reed and Cristy Smith
Copy Editing by Jennifer Maddox, Juliet Macdonald and Derek Wiley

Statesboro, Ga.- Patients fill out paper work while nurses prepare to administer a sleep test. A woman confides in her friends as she waits to be examined by a doctor. This is a night at the emergency room.

When people envision a night at the emergency room, most of them may visualize the place as full of chaos. But according to some who work at East Georgia Regional Medical Center it’s just another night on the job, with very few “real emergencies” worth remembering.

According to Jake Fletcher, patient registrar at EGRMC and a student at Georgia Southern University, the emergency room night life can be on the dull side.

“The most common thing that I see are coughs and sore throats which usually end up just being colds,” Fletcher said.

Emergency rooms in larger cities see more “emergencies” and life threatening situations than Statesboro’s EGRMC. Hospitals in larger cities usually admit more than 80,000 patients a year to its emergency room. It is unclear how many patients EGRMC admits a year.

“I do not see many emergencies at all. It’s pretty boring most of the time, but if you want excitement go to Memorial in Savannah,” Fletcher said. Since Memorial Hospital has patients admitted from surrounding areas and from its own local community, the admission traffic is higher and the E.R. is especially busier.

If you happen to be a security guard at EGRMC, your outlook on the emergency room goes further than the common cold.

“Side patients come in to be mentally evaluated and when they are diagnosed with a mental illness, most of them freak out, and we usually have to call the cops,” Randy Hillsman, a security guard and GSU student said.

Kim McMickle, a registered nurse at EGRMC, has also encountered patients suffering from mental illnesses.

“The scariest aspect of my job is being told by psych patients that they are going to kill me,” McMickle said.

As the security guard, Hillsman finds that the atmosphere is either very laid back or extremely tense, he explained as he completed his accounting homework.

Although it seems boring most of the time, Hillsman has witnessed several babies taken away by the Department of Family and Children’s Services from their parents. This is usually due to some form of child abuse or neglect.

Sanitation engineer Bernstine Johnson has worked for ERGMC for 11 years and previously worked for Claxton Nursing Home. She has not observed many life threatening accidents except for one that she claims she will never forget.

“The scariest thing I’ve ever seen was when a guy came in the emergency waiting room with part of a saw blade in his arm. Blood was everywhere and other patients waiting seemed horrified,” Johnson said. “I would say that happened about three years ago.”

When asked about her saddest moments at work, Johnson recalled many dead patients being rolled out of the hospital doors and into a hearse.

As a registered nurse in the emergency room at EGRMC, the few emergencies that she has to grapple with may include a drunken bar cut or a foreign object stuck in the rectum.

According to McMickle, 10 to 15 percent of GSU students are seen in the emergency room and the reason tends to vary depending on the time of year.

“Usually in August, the starting semester you see the drinkers who have scars and cuts from the bar," McMickle said. "That’s usually the first semester people are here away from mommy and daddy."

The typical drunken bar cuts that McMickle treats are trivial to the few bizarre emergencies she has encountered.

“The goriest thing I’ve ever seen was when a lady hit a man with her car. It ripped him from his scrotum down to his behind, and he was just laid open and his testicles were hanging out. It was pretty gross,” she said.

A lot of people that come in the emergency room are really weird such as foreign bodies in orifices, according to McMickle.

“It wasn’t too long ago there was an electric toothbrush stuck in someone’s rectum,” she said. “We also had a guy with a 20 ounce Coke bottle stuck in his rectum and he said that he fell on it.”

Since there are not usually “real emergencies,” many of the patients become impatient and complain when they have to wait, McMickle explained.

McMickle also expressed concern during emergency room night shifts due to the lack of resources and increased number of traumas that are admitted. Usually surgeries are not performed after 5 p.m. and severe cases are transported to Memorial Health University Medical Center in Savannah.

The emergency room staff consists of 20 nurses, four full-time doctors, five on-call doctors and two physician assistants. The doctors are a part of the Georgia Emergency Association and are affiliated with Candler Hospital, St. Joseph’s Hospital, Coastal Carolina Medical Center, Meadows Regional Medical Center and The Immediate Care Center- Midtown.

At EGRMC there is a nurse first program in the emergency room that ensures the first person that a patient sees is a registered nurse and not an admissions clerk.

“Compared to the hospital in Savannah, the patients here receive care from nurses instead of resident students, which is typical in larger hospitals,” McMickle said.

The emergency room night life that some view on television may be typical in a big city, but in a small town like Statesboro, “real emergencies” are few and far between.