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Having just had emergency surgery and just being released from the hospital after 4 days and having been in emergency 3 times in 4 days, and been misdiagnosed in each instance, I have a question.

You, the patient, do not exist for us; We, the Emergency Department, exist for you.

Who pays/hires whom to perform a service?

Oh and as person that suffered with migraines for 15 years, I can tell you, there IS distress.

Netizen, thank you for sharing your experiences. I hope what follows helps. What I meant by my final statement is that the whole reason that the ER exists is to serve its community, not to shave the community serve it. I was not implying that you were somehow unimportant. If I could have been clearer with that statement, I apologize. The public pays us to apply our best efforts and skill to every patient of every level of acuity. If you feel that your ER has failed you, I encourage you to contact your hospital's administration and share your experience with them. As I said: I cannot speak for every nurse, hospital or department.

There are standards that we as professionals must meet. If we do not meet those standards, then we have failed our patients and our community. Speak up! Enough people complaining about their experiences really can bring about improvement. I will pray for your rapid and full recovery. Having had two migraines in my entire life, I can honestly say that those were two too many. And I know from personal experience how horrifically painful a migraine can be. My own experience helps me to empathize, but of course,'empathy' is not a pain medication.

Wow, that’s a lot... I got misdiagnosed for my appendicitis multiple times over a period of 3 months before someone finally got it right, and even then it was a process of elimination like “Well, we don’t see that your appendix is inflamed, but we’ve ruled out everything else, so let’s just take your appendix out and take a look for anything else that’s wrong while we’re in there”.