>I felt silly, but really everyone that I dealt with was cool about it.
Twice in my life I've presented at the ER with severe chest pain that I thought was heart-related, twice it turned out to be nothing serious (musculo-skeletal pain in one case, very bad indigestion in another), and both times I felt like a fucking idiot for even just showing up, let alone after being told I just need to eat more fruit and shit more often.
But at no point did anyone in the hospital, from the cleaning staff to the nurses to the doctors to the x-ray technicians to the people at the front desk, ever make me feel unwelcome or that I had wasted their time.
When I apologised to a nurse for taking up space in a bed that should have been put to better use for someone who was actually ill, she sat down next to me for a moment and told me that she would rather I was wrong a thousand times and "wasted" a thousand beds in hospital, than right one time and dead at home because I was trying to avoid embarrassment.
Twice in my life I've presented at the ER with severe chest pain that I thought was heart-related, twice it turned out to be nothing serious (musculo-skeletal pain in one case, very bad indigestion in another), and both times I felt like a fucking idiot for even just showing up, let alone after being told I just need to eat more fruit and shit more often.
But at no point did anyone in the hospital, from the cleaning staff to the nurses to the doctors to the x-ray technicians to the people at the front desk, ever make me feel unwelcome or that I had wasted their time.
When I apologised to a nurse for taking up space in a bed that should have been put to better use for someone who was actually ill, she sat down next to me for a moment and told me that she would rather I was wrong a thousand times and "wasted" a thousand beds in hospital, than right one time and dead at home because I was trying to avoid embarrassment.