The patient had already given police trouble, and what happened next would leave an indelible mark on the young nurse attending to her. The woman lunged off a table in the emergency room at Northeast Georgia Medical Center and wrapped both her hands around the neck of Kay Hall, as she was about to give an injection. “As I was drifting away into loss of consciousness, I was thinking I was fixing to die ... and I have a 3-month-old child I’m never going to see grow up,” said Hall, a registered nurse who is now serving as operations manager at the hospital’s ER. Police finally used a nightstick to subdue the patient.
Panel studying violence against emergency room workers