A tale of two hospitals: Legacy Salmon Creek sucks.

Last night, a friend of ours staying here with us was injured when, while walking down the hall, her right thumbnail was caught by a doorknob and almost ripped completely off.

Think about that for a moment.

Blood... and the pain... I can't imagine.

So, we bundle her up and take her to this spiffy newish hospital in this neck of the woods, Legacy over in Salmon Creek.

There's the obligatory long wait... an hour plus.

The pain, you understand, is excruciating.  And it's not getting any less so.

Finally, the doctor sees her... a male doctor, of course.

And his exam? 

Is that a fake nail?  We have to get the fake nail off to get to the real nail.

Our friend:  Well, just cut them both off at the same time.

Doctor: Well, it's going to fall off eventually, so there's nothing I can do.

And he's gone.

It's still bleeding, you understand.

Our friend:  Can't you at least give me something for the pain?

Nurse: he didn't say anything.... let me go check.

Nurse comes back: Here's a couple of Tylenol.

Unbelievable.

Our friend continues to bleed, continues to be experiencing an agony that's hard to describe (after all, there's a reason that ripping off fingernails is a form of torture in interrogations) and these utterly clueless idiots do precisely dick for her.

And that's where SW Washington on Mill Plain comes in.

I'm a layman, I admit it.  But a blind man could see in a minute that our friend needed both treatment and pain management.  It's not like she ripped off her own thumb nail to get some vicodin.

So, we make the decision to go down to SW.

We roll into the hospital emergency room... its around 1 a.m.  I tell her to request a female doctor, because it's fairly obvious that empathy for this sort of thing is in short supply at Legacy among the male doctors.

The woman doctor that treated her took one look and knew what she had to do.

She injected a lidocaine blocker, cut the nail off, put a few stitches in, wrote her some script for pain meds, and we were done in 2 hours.

So, how is it that the doctor at Legacy was such a moron, but the doctor at Southwest knew what to do?

I can't tell you.  But what I can tell you is that I would dive into a vat of boiling hydrochloric acid before I'd ever go to Legacy for anything.

Just sayin'.