What to Know
The emergency room can be stressful for everyone. If you’re a doctor, nurse, or intake specialist, you deal with a wide range of patients daily. If you’re a patient, you usually have to wait far longer than you were prepared to in order for someone to even examine you. It’s usually a mess all around, and in a video that was shared on TikTok of an irate patient in the ER, you can see just how much the ER staff has to deal with on the daily.
Spoiler alert: it’s a lot. In the video, a woman refuses to not be admitted despite her emergency being, well, not much of an emergency at all. For some people, the ER is treated like a doctor’s office, or an urgent care, where they can drop in for something that they could be treated for with a scheduled appointment. When this particular potential patient doesn’t get the outcome she wants, she makes sure everyone knows just how miserable she is. It’s like a 101 lesson in how to be the worst type of ER patient.
Most agree that the woman didn’t even need to go to the ER in the first place.
@blo7243 A patient named Emily Morlock went into the Highland ER complaining of tonsil stones, and when they refused to admit her, she began arguing with staff, raising her voice, recording, other patients, and refusing to leave. The staff handled it with professionalism and grace! #fyp #foryou #healthcare #nurse #viral ♬ original sound – blo
In the TikTok, the patient, Emily, tells a security guard that ER nurses “shined a light” into her throat and didn’t treat her for tonsil stones. But Emily is so sure that she has tonsil stones, despite not being an ear, nose, and throat specialist herself, that she continues to argue with the security guard officer on duty about not being treated properly.
Instead of matching her energy, he calmly reminds her that the ER is not equipped with ENT specialists. In other words, homegirl really needs to go make an appointment and stop wasting everyone’s time. But she doesn’t see it that way.
“I’m telling you that they did not do their job,” Emily says. “I don’t see why I can’t say that someone did an inadequate job.”
As she raises her voice a few octaves too loud, the ER staff members keep cool heads, even after Emily says she is “paying” the staff to help her. I mean, that’s not quite how it works, but OK. And in the comments, other people were inclined to side with the ER.
Was there any question about that, though?
One user pointed out in the TikTok comments, “She has been referred to ENT. She can speak, she can breathe, she is NOT IN NEED OF EMERGENT CARE.”
“Y’all realize healthcare isn’t customer service right?” Another user wrote. Given Emily’s comments about paying the ER and the ER staff working for her, you’d think this concept was foreign to her.
Others joked about her need to go to the ER with tonsil stones, of all things. “Tonsil stones cause bad breath,” someone wrote. “That’s not an emergency.” Another user added, “TONSIL STONES. I would be so embarrassed to go to the ER for this.”
Toward the end of the video, Emily says that the police officer guards in the ER can arrest her for wanting “adequate care.” However, someone tells her calmly, no one is going to arrest her. Honestly, maybe that’s what she wanted to happen, so she could really play up the victim mentality of it all.
As one person pointed out, “People think if they go to the ER, they’ll see a specialist sooner. If they’re stable, as she is, they will be told to make an appointment to see the doctor outpatient.”
