Posted on 07/16/2026 8:51:04 PM PDT by Bobbyvotes
Shortly after 5 a.m. on August 15, 2024, William Hylton stood at the foot of his son’s hospital bed, gently stroking his leg.
Around him, the intensive care unit at Bridgeport Hospital Milford Campus had erupted into chaos. Nurses and doctors pumped on 26-year-old Conor Hylton’s chest, shouting instructions and working frantically to resuscitate him. A breathing tube protruded from his mouth. Dark, lumpy, blood-clotted vomit stained the sheets and pooled on the floor.
“It’s just a very chaotic scene, as you can imagine,” William recalled. “You just want your child to survive. You start trying to make deals with God.”
Across the hallway, William’s wife, Betsy, sat hunched over a trash can, sick with fear.
Then, at 6:11 a.m., a doctor’s voice cut through the commotion.
“Is his family there?”
The voice came from a large monitor mounted on the wall. There, on-screen, was the physician directing the resuscitation efforts. He was 12 miles away, working from Yale New Haven Health’s headquarters in the tele-ICU hub.
(Excerpt) Read more at thefp.com ...
The ambulance drops me off at the ICU but all beds were occupied, so I was left on a stretcher in the hallway. First thing the hospital staff asked me was my insurance card. Then the nurse came and checked my vitals. My heart was racing and my blood pressure was low. I was extremely thirsty and asked for a glass of water. Nurse told me I can't have anything until the doctor sees me. Several minutes passed and still no doctor showed up in the hallway where I lay on the stretcher. My son-in-law had followed the ambulance and was with me but he had no water bottle. He called my wife on phone and asked her to come to the ICU with water. All this time I am still horribly dehydrated and dying for any liquid to soothe my dry throat. Luckily my wife was a good driver and made it quickly to the hospital with water.
All this time there is still no room available in ICU so I am still lying on the stretcher in a hallway. But as soon as drank a bottle of water I felt much better, and I told my wife we can just leave, I am feeling almost normal.
Few days later I get hospital bill for use of ICU. Now that got me real mad. I wrote back to the hospital how they almost killed me by denying a simple drink of water. This was horrible negligent behavior after I had explained to the nurse why I was dehydrated. I told the hospital to get ready for a lawsuit for endangering my life.
The hospital wrote back, saying they were going to review and change the procedures in the ICU for cases like mine and that I owed no money for the ICU visit.
I can not believe a nurse is not allowed to deal with a dehydrated patient and give him water without the almighty doctor okaying it.
Even at our pig outfit hospital, triage will attend to you immediately for anything life threatening.
They can attend to you only when a doctor is available. That was my whole point. I had no existing health issues, had no pain, was not displaying any symptoms which would require surgery. It was a plain and simple case of walking 18 holes without time to drink water. A nurse should use commonsense and furnish water to an obviously dehydrated patient even if a doctor is not available.
If there is ever a place that you never hope to find your self, its the ICU of most American hospitals. High mortality rates and often cookbook medicine rendered by people you do not know.
I can say I, too, was dehydrated and did not know it. My systolic blood pressure went above 250 and couldn’t continue to read the diastolic from the error.
Thankfully, my wife was able to get me to an urgent care that was upgradable to an ER and after a couple hours there, I was okay to head home.
Those urgent care/ ER clinics will get you in, right away. I can say I had to wait at several hospitals with family or friends for issues that they each had to stay 1-3 night over, and had to wait several hours to be seen.
I was told by one staffer the incredibly long wait was from people with no insurance, and, when you saw the packed waiting room, you knew 75% were illegals.
Diagnosis via telehealth is just a huge accident waiting to happen.
There are certain things you just can determine over a computer screen.
As a retired RN, I can tell you that giving a patient anything to eat or drink before being diagnosed is an absolute no-no. However, in a case such as yours, you were capable of having your family give you a drink of water. Of course, if your wife had asked permission, it probably have not been given. There are any number of diagnoses you could have had, based on your symptoms. The best advice I can give anyone is, if at all possible, always have the most medically knowledgeable person you can with you if you have to go to the hospital.
I, too have spent hours on a gurney in the ER hallway (twice).
Triage is a real thing.
As I lay there I saw patients in much worse shape than me
being taken care of (giving birth, heart attack, bleeding).
If your condition is not determined to be life threatening,
they will get to you when they get to you.
I grew up in India and was very lucky to have a mother with common sense. Contagious diseases were common during my years in India and I had my share of sicknesses. My mother was my doctor. She would get the medicines I needed from pharmacy and got me well quickly. In those days in India
people could by any medicines without prescription from a doctor. My mother is the reason I did not die from smallpox. She knew how to heal me from a severe smallpox attack. My entire 8 year body was covered with dime size blusters and very high fevers.
In my encounter with the ICU, neither the golf course or the nurse nor the ambulance personnel were allowed to use common sense and give a glass of water to a 72 year golfer who explained he had not drank any water playing 18 holes in 90 degree weather. Unbelievable control by the medical profession. I am staying healthy at age 86 by using my common sense and ignoring the doctors.
Amen to that. Bureaucracy in hospitals is as bad as the government.
Dehydration is sneaky as you said. Especially as we get older, hydration becomes more important.
For routine care of common ailments all you really need is telehealth to get a prescription. For $29 I got a prescription for gout meds via Amazon. I hadn’t had an attack for years but a week long family reunion and a simple sprain caused a flare up. An urgent care walk in clinic would have cost $300.
It's a g** d*** nightmare.
After nearly an hour of waiting in the local big public hospital ER and against my mother's urging, I went to the intake nurse and politely threatened the hospital based on my family being thick with lawyers and even a judge. Soon after, a young doctor showed up to explain, with an attitude, that they mostly took patients in order of entry, but that gunshot victims got priority, as they surely should.
I countered with the point that my mother could suffer permanent stroke damage from additional delay. Meanwhile, the black teen in cuffs with a cop for company and a minor flesh wound from a gunshot who arrived after but went ahead of my mother for examination and treatment would have been just fine. How would that look for a jury? After a brief pause, the young doctor mumbled that my mother would be next.
A few minutes later, my mother was attended to by two nurses and a doctor. She was given a shot and a scan and admitted to an ICU room for further treatment and observation. A few days later, she was released after her stroke symptoms abated. My mother turns 95 in August and continues to be active and in full possession of her faculties -- and no stroke impairments.
The lesson is that when big hospital ERs are crowded, the obvious and (mostly) easy to assess trauma cases get processed first through the ER, usually into surgery. The often harder to evaluate internal medicine cases can easily get neglected, whether it is dehydration or a TIA or something else.
You weren’t in the ICU. you were in the Emergency Room. Or ER.
By removing tbe illegals our emergency rooms should clear to decent waiting times
EMT’s administer IV fluids without a doctor.
“It was a plain and simple case of walking 18 holes without time to drink water.”
without time?
18 holes?
You chose to abandon common sense, have a completely avoidable and preventable incident, then blame the health care system?
That, my friends, is why Health Care is expensive, Doctors do endless CYA tests, and many are so “unhappy” with care.
Take care of yourself.
Try to maintain your health and avoid sickness.
If you are healthy, you don’t go the phookin hospital.
No one at the golf course could give you water’Gatorade before the ambulance arrived? EMS should have started you on an IV as protocol. Everyone was negligent in this story
“EMT’s administer IV fluids without a doctor.”
They are under DIRECT Doctor supervision, and liability. That’s why.
Good Samaritan laws don’t cover them for their mistakes.
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