Urgent Care Is There When You Need It Most, Like After a Particularly Violent Game of Twister

When my sister and I were still in high school we found ourselves at an urgent care facility at three in the morning. My sister was clutching a tooth in her right hand and one of her finger nails in her left hand. Believe it or not, this was the direct result of a friendly game of Twister gone horribly, horribly wrong. Our parents were out of town. Boys were over. I may have gotten a little rowdy.

Long and embarrassing story short, my sister needed immediate medical care.

I had to find 24 hour urgent care, because back then I was terrified of the emergency room. Earlier that year I learned that there were about 110 million visits to the emergency room every single year. This fact alone is not so scary until you also note that us lazy Americans who can never wash our hands also get almost 1 billion colds each year. Each year between 5 and 20 percent of the population will come down with the flu! So what does that mean? It means that there are a lot of people at emergency rooms, and a lot of those people probably have a cold, or the flu, or some flesh eating disease. To me the emergency room meant a lot of misery. No, that would not do. Instead I drove us to the nearest urgent care facility.

The urgent care patient first realizes that there are a lot of qualified staff in these medical centers. I made a comment to one of the nurses and she told me that something like 129,043 people were employed by urgent care centers throughout the United States. I did think it was a bit strange that the nurse had that fact at the ready but at the time all I cared about was getting through the night.

This place put my sister as an urgent care patient first. They ignored my protests that it was an accident. They politely and calmly brought her to a doctor and did not acknowledge my diatribe on how anyone might get hyper active when it came to Twister.

Back then I did not know that although urgent care centers primarily serve the purpose of treating sudden conditions, like having a tooth knocked out and a finger nail ripped off, they also are more commonly providing peripheral medical services such as lab tests, physicals, and xrays. I sat in the waiting room plotting excuses when my sister texted me, which I imagine might have been difficult with one finger out of commission. Her message said that she had just texted our parents and they were on their way home.

This little urgent care patient first and foremost forgot that no one was supposed to be over our house that late at night, never mind that many of the impromptu party attendees were boys. Maybe I was going to get in trouble, but so was she.
Great references here.