College brings freedom from parents, but it also leaves students on their own to deal with health issues.
During the fall of his freshman year, sophomore Troy Holleman found himself in a tough situation. He was experiencing rather intense symptoms resembling bronchitis in the middle of the night.
"Of course though, the Wellness Center was closed," Holleman said. "There was nowhere else within 25 miles of DePauw that acts as an immediate care center [aside from Putnam County hospital]."
Holleman called Public Safety and they informed him of his options: he could either drive to a hospital in Indianapolis, or go to the Putnam County hospital. Since it was the middle of the night, Holleman chose to seek medical attention from Putnam County hospital.
Holleman waited to get care. A nurse attended to him after what he said was quite awhile. He was asked a few general questions, and then a man presented himself as the doctor.
Upon assessing his symptoms, they diagnosed him with acute bronchitis and treated his immediate symptoms with a nebulizer. Holleman thought that the treatment was over, but then without any form of a warning, the doctor gave him a steroid shot in his arm.
"I learned right away how ridiculously painful this stuff was. For about ten minutes, my heart was beating so fast that I couldn't even close my eyes," Holleman said. "I couldn't even drive home."
Holleman called his family doctor and learned afterward that due to the strength of the steroids, the shots are meant to be given in the thigh. Holleman's initial problem was fixed, but now he had a new ailment. The entire process took about four and a half hours. According to Holleman's family doctor, it could have been done in under an hour.
While Holleman feels that the Wellness Center's hours are far from satisfactory, he does believe that they provide students with the immediate care they need.
He cannot say the same for Putnam County hospital.
"If I find myself in this situation again, there's no way I would go back to Putnam County hospital," Holleman said.
When reached by phone for comment, a woman from Putnam County hospital's marketing department said that she thought the relationship between the hospital and DePauw students was okay.
""I believe that our relationship with students that come and seek our care is generally pretty good. Unfortunately, though, because we aren't students' family doctors, those one-on-one relationships that we have with students is somewhat absent. We do our best to treat them with whatever resources we have," the marketing employee said. The employee would not give her name for the story.
Sophomore Stephanie Aanenson agrees with Holleman. Last week, the Wellness Center diagnosed Aanenson with a urinary tract infection, but alerted her of her unusually high white blood cell count. The Wellness Center gave her the standard medication and sent her home. Pain killers that were given to Aanenson gave her immediate relief, but her condition later took a turn for the worse.
Within hours after her appointment, Aanenson's roommate, junior Sally Leaf found her in their room, violently ill.
"Her symptoms were scary," Leaf said. "She seemed to be exhibiting signs that signaled that the infection had spread to her kidneys."
After calling Putnam County Hospital and receiving no advice as to how to proceed, sophomore Adam Thacker took initiative and drove her to the emergency room, where their experience was less than satisfactory.
"It was awful. The nurse that worked with us was extremely rude," Thacker said. "She was very uninformative, impatient, and overall just had terrible bedside manner."
According to Aanenson, the doctor was uninformative, and only ended up giving her anti-nausea pills. "I asked him so many questions, and he just gave me incredibly vague answers. I was left alone for an entire hour," Aanenson said. "I just didn't know what was happening and was clueless as to what was going on the entire time."
Aanenson appreciated that the doctors took care of her immediate symptoms, but she doesn't feel that they were nearly as helpful as they should have been and doesn't plan to use Putnam County hospital as a health resource in the future.