"I Felt Like I Was Home"

Lindsay Haleta is a pharmacist who has always been pretty healthy. So when she ended up in the ER at Brookings Health System with what she

thought was a cyst, she didn’t think it was a big deal. 

However, when a CT revealed a large abscess, Avera general surgeon Dr. Jeffery Johnson got her straight into the OR to deal with it. Haleta is grateful for the fast, quality care she received at Brookings Health System.

“I was admitted to the hospital for seven days,” says Haleta. “The staff was simply amazing. I was under medication for five days, so I’m a little fuzzy on what happened, so I asked my husband about it.” Haleta continues with tears in her eyes, “He said it best: ‘It didn’t feel like I was in the hospital. It felt like I was home. Because everybody was just so concerned and so thoughtful that we felt like we were at home.’” 

A couple weeks later, Dr. Johnson performed a colonoscopy to determine the cause of the abscess.

“While the colonoscopy didn’t give us a diagnosis or any real cause, Dr. Johnson did find a pretty nasty polyp in there that at this point was our silver lining,” says Haleta. “Had I not had that colonoscopy, I very likely would have had colon cancer at a really young age.”

The next week, Haleta went in for a follow up with Dr. Johnson. She had increased tenderness, but she thought she was just overdoing it. Dr. Johnson thought otherwise.

“I was given 24 hours to feel better,” she says. “The next day I was working (at the Walmart pharmacy) and looked up to see Dr. Johnson shopping in the store. I shot him a thumbs down to let him know I wasn’t feeling better. And by the time I left for lunch a few minutes later, the clinic was calling to schedule surgery. The next morning I went in for surgery.”

This time, Dr. Johnson found a fistula tract in a place it shouldn’t be. That was the cause of the abscesses. He sent Haleta to a colorectal surgeon at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, where she continues her surgical treatment. She says the Mayo doctors are very complimentary of the work Dr. Johnson performed. 

“It was a bad situation but a good experience,” she says. “My idea of what good healthcare is changed when I became a patient at Brookings Health. My new standard of care is the genuine, quality, personalized care that I have received at Brookings Health. From housekeeping, to dietary, to nurses and doctors. They are so polite and so considerate.”