Since coming to school at the University of Iowa, like most every other college student, I seem to be sick more often than I am not. Chalk that up to always sharing a room with multiple people, the ever-changing weather or the amount that we all go out here – the fact of it is, students like myself, always seem to have some type of illness.
When I came to school here, I had heard about UI QuickCare, which is supposed to be similar to immediate care, a place that students have easy access to when they aren’t feeling well. Sounds magical, right? I can get treated in between classes (because it’s “quick”) and I should be able to leave with antibiotics that treat the varying symptoms, right? Wrong.
To quickly summarize my particular “beef” with QuickCare, all I can really say is that every time I’ve gone in, I have somehow left feeling even worse than when I came in.
I am someone who frequently gets chronic sinus infections, I have since I was 12 years old, so I know my body and what it feels like when I have one. The first time I went to QuickCare with one, they told me to do a neti-pot and take a Sudafed (which I already take almost daily) – I ended up with bronchitis.
The second time I went in with pink eye in one of my eyes, they prescribed me drops, great. Well, they were the wrong prescription and I had to go to the ER and get my eyes numbed after.
Finally, I went in again last semester with just a simple sinus infection and was prescribed, yet again, the wrong medicine – even after my pleading with the nurse for the antibiotic I knew I needed. I left with pneumonia, an ear infection and pink eye (what a fun combo!). I missed school for two weeks.
So I made a tweet…
My friend Leah and I were talking about how much of a struggle it was to get treated there – which lead me to tweet this:
I wasn’t expecting a response, but what I tweeted back both validated and baffled me. I received a whopping total of 138 responses (yes, I really did count them) from students all facing similar problems, not just from UI Quikcare, but those at ISU and UNI too. There were stories told from being sent home with anything from a broken arm to them missing a cancer diagnosis.
Here are some of my favorite responses:
These are just a few of the responses that made me realize that I wasn’t the only one who had an awful experience there. And, it showed how poorly the care that students are being given can really be. I get it, we’re college kids and it seems to be that QuickCare’s first response is to disregard our symptoms as somthing minimal.
Here’s what they fail to realize: none of us that go in there actually want to miss class to spend two hours waiting to be misdiagnosed. We’re not in middle school trying to get out of class by taking a nap on the nurse’s cot. Some of us are actually sick and need immediate medical attention. What I do not understand is how so many people express experiencing inadequate care, yet nothing is changing or being done to fix it.
The tweets come off as comical because of how off the doctors have been about everyone’s diagnoses. But, as much as we laugh about it, the reality is that our health isn’t funny and all we are asking is for doctors to accurately listen to what we’re saying and make us better.
And, that’s the tea about QuickCare, sis. Like I said before, it’s our bodies and even though we don’t have a medical degree, we know when something is wrong. Long story short, don’t go to QuickCare unless you want to wait there for hours and leave being misdiagnosed.