Before coming to the ER...

Here are a few things to ponder:

Do I actually have a medical emergency? What constitutes a medical emergency you ask? Excellent question, lets delve right in shall we?

*Medical emergency with blood: vomiting blood, peeing blood, bloody stool, bleeding from your eyes, bleeding from an artery, bleeding due to loss or near loss of limb, bleeding varicies because you can't put the bottle down, and bleeding from a gunshot wound or any other other penetrating object.

*NON-medical emergency with blood: Most head wounds (try washing away the blood and you'll see that the scratch causing the mess is less than a cm wide and bandaids only cost like $4 at Walgreens), bleeding from a large pimple you've been scratching, bleeding from a hangnail, and very importantly, bleeding because its the 15th of the month again, please understand, this is in fact, normal.

*Medical emergency with chest pain: You feel like there is an elephant having a tea party on your chest and tums are NOT working, you have a history of like 20 heart surgeries and you've decided to stop taking your medicine, the pain is accompanied by extreme shortness of breath.

*NON-medical emergency with chest pain: You've had a cough for 7 months and it makes your chest hurt, you were punched and/or tackled playing flag football, you smoke 7 packs a day, or you've had a recent chest wax (gross).

This list could pretty much go on forever, so I'll just throw out a few examples of where, I promise, if you stay home, it's all good:

-You got soap in your eyes (I don't understand, is it made with turpentine? what's the problem here...)
-You feel sad (rest assured whomever checks you in will put a large sadface emoticon next to you chief diagnosis)
-You have a weird rash X5 months
-You were watching Discovery health and you think you're overweight (here's an apple?)
-You prefer an $800 pregnancy test to a $5 OTC pregnancy test (The one's a hospital uses are probably cheaper than the dollar store brand...)
-You think you have the flu. Well good thing you came because we just barely came up with a cure for Influenza...wait, no, no we didn't.