08/26/2026
Good morning Dirty 330! I hope you are well!
Let me first say that I have the utmost respect for healthcare workers. We are extremely lucky to have access to the medical treatment and incredible people that we do.
With that being said, I want to address some things that I was a party to and witnessed at the Akron General Cleveland Clinic emergency room on Monday/Tuesday. It was shameful, and hopefully it will lead to discussions that can have a positive effect for patients in the future.
Unfortunately I had to go to the ER on Monday evening due to a critically low blood sugar level. I arrived at Akron General just before 7pm. They checked me in immediately, the waiting room was maybe 25% full.
I was called into a room within 5 minutes and a male nurse took my vitals, recorded my symptoms and they immediately drew blood to run labs. I was then sent back to the waiting room to wait for my lab results.
An hour later, I was called back in to take additional blood for further labs. That took another 5 minutes, then back to the waiting room. At this point, it was 8pm.
We sat and waited for hours. No communication at all. The waiting room kept filing with more people. All of them taken back for vitals and labs upon arrival. Then sitting in the waiting room like the rest of us.
An over-80yr old couple waiting for a CT scan. A woman waiting on a CT scan. Another woman waiting for an x-ray. A woman having chest pains and trouble breathing. This went on for hours. By 12am, there was not a single person that had been called back or seen. People continued showing up.
There were kids literally fighting, beating on each other in the waiting room. People were making beds with blankets and sleeping on the floors. There were patients in wheel chairs with oxygen masks that were told they were being admitted, but they have no empty beds and nowhere to put them. So they just sat in the waiting room to wait.
Not a single hospital staff gave any updates, and when asked they simply stated “we have nowhere to put anyone to have them meet with a doctor and we cannot provide test results”.
This went on all night. Countless people that had been sitting and waiting for hours got up and left as they couldn’t wait any longer. People had to go to work. Kids had to go to school. It was a mess. All because they had “nowhere to put anyone”.
Finally, at 6:15am, I was called in to see a doctor. As I walked to the back, I passed room after room, and they were all EMPTY. How was this even possible? I just sat and waited for almost 12hrs after coming in with a condition that had put me in ICU a few months ago, and there were no patients in any of the rooms I passed that were supposedly “full”?
I was immediately put in a room and hooked up to monitors. Within 10 minutes, a doctor came in the room and told me “your labs are all good, you can go home”. That was it. He was literally in the room for less than 2 minutes, and only because I asked a few questions. He didn’t seem interested in answering any of them.
There was no treatment. No explanations for anything that happened, what caused any of this. Just “your labs are all good, you can go home”. It took 12 hours for someone to tell me that?
I call BS. My labs were made available on MyChart at 10:30am, and they tell a different story. As anyone with MyChart knows, you are bombarded with emails and notifications the second anything is received, including labs. How did a doctor come in and tell me my labs were good and they had been read at 6:15am, however they didn’t show up on MyChart until 10:30am.
I was the first person called back after sitting all night. There were only a handful of us still sitting there, everyone else had left.
Nobody cared. Nobody was being informed of anything. The worst part of all of this?
The hospital charges every single one of those people that came in the moment they were checked in. They are charged for a visit. The vitals being taken immediately locks in more charges, because technically services were provided. It’s SHAMEFUL.
Akron General Cleveland Clinic, you have a lot of explaining to do. To those that were in the waiting room and experienced this as well, I hope you got better results than I did, but I’m guessing you didn’t.
The Cleveland Clinic webpage shows a bold lettered statement saying “We’re here when you need us - for every care in the world”.
They may have been there, and they may be touted as a world-class hospital. Ultimately, they failed the entire room Monday night, and they need to make some changes because human beings don’t deserve that type of treatment.
Stay Vigilant!
