Hospitals not seeing many injuries related to cold
People in the suburbs largely got the message to stay inside Monday, as most local hospitals were not reporting life-threatening injuries related to the weather.
Advocate Sherman Hospital in Elgin treated a 41-year-old man for frostbite Monday morning and released him the same day, said Tonya Hudson, the hospital’s director of public affairs and marketing.
“The frostbite was severe to his fingers,” Hudson said, adding that the man works outside for a living.
Centegra Health System in Woodstock also treated one person with cold and frostbite symptoms.
Cadence Health’s Delnor Hospital in Geneva was quiet.
“We certainly haven’t seen anybody come in with frostbite or hypothermia or the shoveling type of stuff you might see,” said Chris King, manager of public relations for Cadence Health. “It certainly sounds like folks are weathering the storm as well as they can.”
A representative from Presence St. Joseph Hospital in Elgin could not be reached for comment Monday.
Ro Ostergaard, a spokeswoman for Advocate Good Shepherd Hospital in Lake Barrington, said emergency room doctors have reported seeing an influx of patients with injuries from slipping on ice since the deep freeze hit. So far, they have not handled frostbite or other similar cases.
Based on the emergency room cases at Advocate Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge, the normal winter issues of snow and ice seemed to be much more of a factor than the extreme cold Monday.
While there were no cases of hypothermia, the hospital received several patients injured by falling on the ice and one who suffered cardiac arrest while shoveling snow, according to Dr. Douglas Propp, chair of Lutheran General’s Department of Emergency Medicine.
The number of snow and ice injuries — just under 10 — was fairly typical for a midwinter day, Propp said. His expectation had been that there would be fewer than normal because of more people staying indoors from the cold, he added.
Northwest Community Hospital in Arlington Heights reported nothing out of the normal at all as of late afternoon Monday. Spokesman Patrick Reilly said people seemed to have heeded the warnings and followed the recommendations regarding the brutally low temperatures.
At Edward Hospital and Elmhurst Memorial Hospital, emergency room physicians saw a typical amount of patients with nothing weather-related to report.
“It’s really kind of odd,” said Keith Hartenberger, public information officer for Edward-Elmhurst Heathcare. “Both places all day have reported nothing. They’ve credited it to several days of warnings about the weather. People have apparently heeded the warnings, at least today anyway.”
Other DuPage hospitals, including Central DuPage Hospital, Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital and Rush-Copley Medical Center also had nothing weather-related to report.