I Needed Help & Avera Treated Me Like a Problem

A first-hand account of what happens when empathy disappears from medicine — and how a patient, writhing in agony, becomes an inconvenience instead of a human being.

It started just after dawn, the hour when the human body stops pretending it can take any more pain. Every muscle in me was seizing, every nerve screaming for mercy, my body caught somewhere between shock and collapse. The smart thing to do would have been to drive ten minutes farther to Sanford Health, but when you’re drowning, you don’t argue with geography — you just head toward the closest shore.

Avera Health was closer. That’s all that mattered then. I wish it hadn’t been.

They wheeled me in wearing pajama pants, trembling, gasping for air, barely coherent but still lucid enough to explain everything — the medication I was on, the test results I already had, the fact that I knew it was a kidney stone. I spoke with clarity and desperation. They looked at me like I was faking it.

The yelling started almost immediately. Not questions. Not care. Just sharp, clipped voices echoing down sterile hallways — Stay back. Stop moving. We told you to wait. Each word carried the same message: You’re not a patient; you’re a nuisance.

When they finally gave me pain medication, I thought it would calm things down. It didn’t. Their tone stayed cold, their patience thinner than the blanket they finally gave me when imaging took me for a CT. They spoke to me as if my pain was an inconvenience to them personally, as if I had brought it with bad manners.

Then even though I warned them there was a stone close to coming out here came the catheter. No numbing. No gentleness. Just hands moving fast, impatient, clinical. The pain ripped through me as it pushed the stone back in me, and when I screamed — reflexively, involuntarily — they yelled at me again. Not concern. Not even acknowledgment. Just reprimand. I’ve had a catheter before; I know what it feels like when someone cares enough to be careful. This wasn’t that. This was punishment disguised as procedure. One nurse even hissed, “This is a hospital emergency room — we can’t have you screaming like that.”

When it was over, one of them scolded me for not producing enough urine, though I’d already told them I had emptied my bladder before coming in. It was as if they were determined to find fault with me instead of my body.

And then, amidst that cold indifference, a single nurse leaned close and whispered something I’ll never forget:

“We should get you admitted. The nurses upstairs are a lot nicer than the ones down here.”

It wasn’t an apology, but it was the closest thing to humanity I heard all morning — a quiet confession from someone trapped in the same system that was crushing me.

Minutes later, the lab results came in — and the numbers told the truth my voice could not. My white blood count was 12.1, my platelets high at 507, my carbon dioxide low at 15, my anion gap 23 — all signs of physical distress and dehydration. My creatinine was 1.7, my GFR 46 — a body under stress, yes, but not failing. Even my urine, turbid and laced with 3+ blood, confirmed the kidney stone I’d described. Every test verified what I’d been trying to tell them: I wasn’t exaggerating. I was enduring.

They later told me I was “close to kidney failure,” a phrase meant to frighten, not inform. When I pulled up the labs myself, I saw the truth — a system strained but surviving. The data didn’t justify their drama. It justified my pain.

By the time they released me, I was hollowed out — not by the pain, but by the treatment. They even followed me out, telling me to go to Sanford next time. Not “Get well soon.” Not “Take care.” Just “Don’t come back.”

I left Avera that morning weaker than I’d arrived. Not physically — that pain I could handle. It was the human absence that broke me. The way indifference can cut deeper than any illness.

A Pattern of Neglect: Another Patient Speaks

After speaking with Dominick Counts, who also happened to be at Avera at the same time — for the same reason — the story of neglect became harder to dismiss as coincidence. Dominick was hospitalized for three days due to kidney stones and shared his account of what he described as “the worst medical care I’ve ever received.”

“Started out with lower right side pain going into Avera for treatment,” Counts said. “Normally I wouldn’t leave a review, but given the poor lack of care and concern I received for the amount of pain I was experiencing, I felt it was necessary to leave one.”

He explained that when he arrived, the pain was so unbearable his family had to wheel him in. He had received a call saying a room was ready — only to be told upon arrival that it wasn’t. For forty minutes, he sat shaking in agony, waiting for the room to be cleaned, with no offer of relief or even basic compassion.

“After about another hour, to hour and a half, they finally gave me some mild pain sedative — fentanyl,” Counts said. “Unfortunately this pain med only lasted about 10–15 minutes, and I was told they could only give it once every hour. I felt like my treatment was dragged out because they assumed it was just kidney stones.”

But it wasn’t that simple.

“Come to find out the next day, I had contracted pneumonia through their lack of urgency and care for my well-being,” he said. “They ended up sending me home with poor liver condition still not at the levels they should’ve been for my GFR and creatinine — and still having pneumonia.”

His conclusion echoed my own:

“Personally, due to the poor care I received, I will bear a little more pain to go a little farther — to be treated by Sanford Health. I’ve never received this bad of care from them.”

When Empathy Flatlines

Two patients, two stories, one institution — both marked by pain, neglect, and the quiet horror of being treated as a problem rather than a person. These are not isolated grievances; they are symptoms of a deeper illness within the system — one where efficiency replaces empathy, and the human body becomes an inconvenience to be processed.

Ironically, Avera Health promotes itself as a 5-star healthcare network, celebrated by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) for “patient experience” and “safety of care.” Yet those same metrics rarely capture what happens in the moments between paperwork and pain.

The federal Overall Hospital Quality Star Ratings and HCAHPS surveys are built to measure satisfaction — but not dignity. No number can quantify the sound of a patient screaming for help and being told to stay quiet.

In South Dakota, patients have two years to file a malpractice claim under § 15-2-14.1, and noneconomic damages are capped at $500,000 under § 21-3-11. The law recognizes suffering but puts a price ceiling on it — as if anguish has a budget.

The foundation of malpractice law rests on four principles: duty, breach, causation, and damages. Yet for most patients, the real barrier isn’t the burden of proof — it’s the endurance required to keep fighting after being broken.

Still, accountability is possible. In 2023, a South Dakota jury awarded $2.5 million against Sanford Health for failing to diagnose blood clots — proof that even powerful systems can be forced to face the harm they cause.

Hospitals are supposed to be sanctuaries of compassion. But sometimes, when systems run cold and humanity burns out, they become factories of suffering — efficient, sterile, and mercilessly indifferent.

That morning, Avera wasn’t a hospital. It was proof that medicine without empathy is just another machine — and people like us are what get crushed in its gears.

At that point, I would have rather been treated by an AI doctor with programmed empathy than by the humans who seemed to have deleted theirs.

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Machines of Mercy