You’d Think A Hospital Would Have A Better Eye For Safety

I take my mom in for her knee replacement surgery. As she is expected to be discharged the same day, she needs a responsible adult to remain at the hospital while she is back having her procedure. The waiting area is essentially a wide hallway along the side of the pre-op center. It’s lined with windows and has nice comfy armchairs for us to sit in, so I settle in with my laptop and beverage to wait.

I’m sitting with my back against the windows when the person sitting opposite me suddenly exclaims that the sky is looking nasty. I turn around and look, and indeed, it looks like a storm is rolling in. Nasty thunderstorms are normal for the area, so I shrug and return to my work.

A few minutes later, everyone’s cell phones go off with emergency weather alerts. We are under a tornado warning and should seek shelter. I start packing my bag and looking around for a place to go that isn’t in the wide hallway filled with windows when a staff member rushes by and tells us all to seek shelter — but does not tell us where. So, we all (about twenty-five people) traipse up to the reception desk at the end of the hallway to ask where we are supposed to shelter. The staff there tells us to sit back down because we don’t shelter until security tells us to shelter.

We all huddle together as far from the windows as it is possible to get and start looking at the weather radar to see that there is a tornado in our general vicinity. About that time, a second alert comes through on our phones, and a siren starts going off on the roof where the medivac choppers are parked. Again, a staff member walking by quickly asks us why we aren’t sheltered, and we reply that no one will tell us where to go; all the visitor-accessible areas are along the outside window walls as far as we can see. She tells us to take shelter in the pre-op center, so we all get up and try to get in that door. Yet again, the reception staff tell us we can’t go in there until security says to shelter.

Finally, after the sky has started to lighten up, there is an overhead PA announcement about taking shelter. So, they herd us in, and we are cluttering up that area, trying as hard as we can to stay out of people’s way. Some of the staff back there are trying to rustle up chairs to put along the wall for some of the less ambulatory folks, and the rest of us are stuck standing. We look at the weather maps on our phones again and see that the storm has passed us and the warning has been lifted, but you guessed it, we can’t leave our “shelter” until security says so.

Finally, about fifteen minutes later, security gets the memo and announces the all-clear on the PA, and we are able to return to the comfy seats.

About twenty minutes after that, I get the call from Mom’s surgeon that her surgery is complete and they will be moving her to post-op shortly. The ORs are in the very center of the building, about as sheltered as they can be, so they didn’t even pause the surgery while we were all playing stand-up turn-around sit-down outside.

All of the staff was quite polite the whole time and tried to act professionally, but it was still quite alarming that at least two different sets of conflicting emergency procedures were in play at the same time.