Are you ready for a funny story? Okay, not funny – it’s actually terrifying.
Warning: if you want to continue trusting University Health Services at your school (or maybe just at Harvard), I advise you to stop reading now.
Harvard almost killed me yesterday.
Here’s how it went down: I live on the second floor of my dorm. My next door neighbor is our tutor (Harvard’s version of an RA). The tutor, lets call him Mike, is a student at Harvard Medical School. He’s really smart, very nice, and likes to cook for the people living in our entryway (the section of our dorm that falls under him). Mike is great.
It being winter and all, many people in our dorm have extra heaters. Two days ago, we think that one of the heaters on our floor stopped properly ventilating the CO that it was releasing. Mike being the smart med student that he is, had installed a CO detector in his room as a precaution. CO, or Carbon Monoxide, is a colorless, odorless and tasteless gas that is highly toxic to both humans and animals. Due to the undetectable nature of the gas, it’s important to have a CO detector. Two days ago, my roommate and I kept hearing this annoying beeping sound coming from Mike’s room. Mike was at the med school so we couldn’t ask him what it was. Someone on the maintenance staff came to our room asking what the beeping noise was. We told him that it was coming from Mike’s room. At this point the maintenance staff member went into Mike’s room found the source of the beeping and made it stop.
Turns out the beeping noise was coming from Mike’s CO detector. The maintenance staff member made it stop by unplugging it. I’m sure that he had no idea what he was doing – he was trying to help actually! I presume that he was trying to help us study by ridding our floor of the annoying beeping.
Skip forward 30 hours to lat night around 7pm. A natural gas smell pervaded the stairwell. My roommate and I went to ask about it. A custodial worker was sent up to check out the situation. He came into my room with the Carbon Monoxide detector and immediately ordered me and my roommate to leave. He said he was calling the fire department and that we weren’t allowed back in. Within 5 minutes, the fire department had arrived. They went up to my room with something called a “sniffer” and within 3 minutes of their arrival they had pulled the fire alarm and ordered us all to evacuate the building.
My boyfriend and I went to the Harvard University Health Services Urgent Care room. I told them that there was Carbon Monoxide in my room and that I wanted to make sure that I was okay. The nurse I spoke with looked at me like I was crazy and said “If there was Carbon Monoxide in Adams House, I’m sure we would have heard about it.”
Before even considering treating me, the staff at HUHS took over an hour and half to check my story. I don’t know if they thought I was lying to them or if they thought I was stupid. Either way, I doubted whether or not they would actually treat me.
After they finally got in touch with the Resident Dean of my house, they told me to go to “a hospital” because they couldn’t do the test at HUHS. I was a bit confused – I thought that HUHS was a hospital. I won’t make that mistake again.
I was sent to Mt. Auburn Hospital in a cab where the staff was wonderful. The nurses were all caring, efficient, and professional. Unlike my experience at HUHS, the nurses at Mt. Auburn trusted what I said and took me back almost immediately for a blood test. The doctor I met with was amazing. She couldn’t believe the story I told her regarding the inadequacies of the care (or lack thereof) that I had received at HUHS, not to mention the inability of Harvard to inform their custodial staff on the function and importance of CO detectors.
Part of the prescription that the Mt. Auburn doctor sent me home with: Buy your own CO detector.
Suggestions for the future:
Harvard needs to provide all student rooms with CO detectors and to instruct the custodial staff on the details of their functioning.
Custodial staff should be instructed not to unplug beeping alarm devices.
Harvard University Health Services should learn to trust the students the students that they are supposed to support.