Emergency Room!

On Monday we experienced the social health care system here in England firsthand. We took a fun little trip to the ER! Luckily it's just down the road and Elin was home and could drive us there. And I'm happy to report, it wasn't for me for once!!! But I'm not happy to report that Brian had a minor mishap and has a large stab wound in his hand. Yikes! He's doing just fine and it's going to heal nicely. So the story goes. . .

We had just received our new bikes (well used bikes) and some accessories. Brian was opening some packaging with his Leatherman pocket knife and it slipped and almost the entire length of the blade went into his left hand between the thumb and pointer finger! It started bleeding profusely and I've never seen him turn so white. As we all know, I don't do well with blood at all. But since I realized he might pass out this time, I couldn't and had to figure out what we should do. So I found the neighbor to give us a ride and figured out where to go. We were mainly concerned he either severed a tendon or hit an artery or something. We found the ER for Minor Injuries at the hospital and all we had to do to check in was give them his name, a UK address, and US address and a phone number if we had one. That's it. No insurance info, passport, national insurance number, nada. Frankly, after all is said and done we don't know if we'll get a bill in the mail, or if emergency services is covered on the NHS (National Health Service), which we think it is. So we'll find out.

Anywho, he was triaged by a nurse right away. She just cleaned it and looked it over. Then told us to wait for the doctor to call his name. The wait was about 60 minutes, but could have been worse. The doc looked at it, made fun of Brian with his British humor about stabbing himself, and said he didn't hit anything major. So the nurse came back in, gave him a tetnus shot, some painkillers and put the strip things on the wound (instead of real stitches) to close it up. Understandably so, Brian wasn't up for the rest of the afternoon to go to work, so we grabbed some sandwiches for lunch and he chilled at home while I did some grocery shopping with Elin. Exciting day!