Dick Orndorff

As a retired electrical engineer for a nationwide company, Dick Orndorff has lived in and visited the emergency centers of major metropolitan areas across the country, including cities like Milwaukee, Cleveland and Pittsburgh. Unfortunately, those experiences led him to expect the worst when an injury one March afternoon in Tallahassee, called for a trip to his neighborhood ER, the Tallahassee Memorial Emergency Center – Northeast.




Oddly enough, Dick was preparing for a possible crisis by building a shed for his emergency generator when an immediate and unexpected emergency arose. As he was drilling a hinge onto the shed, his drill bit snapped, causing the drill to lurch backward and cut through the bone of his left forefinger.




“My wife was home at the time, and I told her, ‘I’m not going to an ER,” Dick recalls.




However, after finding that a nearby walk-in clinic did not accept his insurance, Dick was advised by his daughter, a local pharmacist, to try visiting the Emergency Center - Northeast.




Within just a few moments of arriving, Dick was ushered back to a comfortable patient room and into the care of the center’s physicians and nurses. Dick received a tetanus shot and medicine to alleviate his pain, and his hand was set in a splint to heal. Although the clinical care put him on the mend, what struck him most about his visit was the confidence and kindness of the staff.




“I was expecting the worst, but the group at the Emergency Center – Northeast really cares about the patient,” he says. “If anything else happens, I would go back there in a second.”