8/9/07 It's Not the Amount of Blood You Lose, It's Where It's Coming From

So here's something fun: Yesterday, the head of HR came to our team meeting and announced that according to our health insurance people, Ye Ol Company was going to the emergency room 40% more than other companies they represented. 40% more! HR thought this was extremely fishy, because either we are all prone to frequent extreme mishaps, or some people were going to the emergency room when they didn't really have to. So the head of HR was making her rounds to explain to everyone in the company that the emergency room was just for that: emergencies. And since emergency room visits cost an average of $900 and regular doctor visits cost $60, the insurance company was most keen on reducing these little medical sojourns.

While HR Lady did her spiel, I studied the faces of my cohorts to see if I could tell who might be a closet emergency room abuser. I was smugly secure that I wasn't the problem, because I haven't been to the emergency room since the time I was playing flag football in college and that fat sorority cow on the opposing team pushed me down and stomped on my ankle. (I'm pretty sure she did it on purpose. Never trust a sorority football team. They play dirty). Not only that, but I had to go get it X-rayed, so I sat in the waiting room for HOURS with the rest of Knoxville's clumsy, unlucky, or just plain crazy. (It's my experience that the emergency room attracts people that are more than a bit nutty, and since my team "uniform" happened to be a severely cropped pink tie-dyed t-shirt with "K-3 Hotties" glitter-painted across the chest, I'm sure that I fit right in. I knew we should have been the K-3 Krushers!)

But I digress. The point was that my hypochondriac coworkers were abusing their emergency room privileges, and the company was out to put a stop to it. Their weapon of choice was a book entitled, "Health at Home" which was designed to help you decide if you needed the emergency room, or a regular doctor visit, or just 3 Advil and a Band-Aid. It's a good sized book, and it covers everything from cancer to scrapes and burns to excess flatulence. (And because we're all really 12, we immediately read choice parts of the flatulence section out loud while we snickered).

The book plays out in kind of a Choose Your Own Adventure deal, where it asks you questions, and depending on if you answer yes or no, tells you how soon you need to seek medical attention. Only instead of "Should you swim into the deep dark underwater cave after the mysterious guy with the knife? If yes, turn to page 23" it says things like, "Can you see the bone protruding from your flesh? If yes, go to the emergency room." I was flipping through the book last night though, and I noticed a common (if a bit disgusting) theme. No matter what the ailment was, there was a question about blood in the stool. The section on sinus inflections asks if you also have blood in your stool. The section on pink eye asks about blood in the stool. The section on excess flatulence has an entire paragraph on blood in the stool. (I'm guessing that the authors really had a hang-up on bloody stool. No doubt an interesting back story there somewhere). Pink poop must be serious business too, because if you answer yes to it, you best get to the emergency room ASAP.

I don't know if the book will help us reduce emergency room visits, but it is a neat thing to have around the house. We keep it next to our first aid kit so if I happen to fall off the roof or cut my finger off with the circular saw, Tony can grab the Band-Aids and the book at the same time. Then I can be wrapping my severed limbs in gauze while Tony goes through the emergency room checklist.

Heaven help me if I ever have bloody stool.