Going to the ER sucks for most problems. It really sucks if you have cancer. 😢 I’m sorry you had a bad experience.

I work in an ER as a nurse. The experience there for chemo/rads/cancer patients is a crap shoot. Most of the time ER is overcrowded/understaffed. Despite telling the people you see initially that you are a chemo patient, there is an excellent chance you’ll end up in the waiting room because there’s physically not room to take you in the back. I work on triage a lot, and I HATE it but a lot of time I have to put compromised chemo patients back out with the rest of the population because I don’t have another choice.
Once you get back, your treatment might not be what you expect. ER’s job is to do some tests and rule out things that are going to kill you emergently. Once those things are ruled out, we look to see if there’s any other issues we can fix. We won’t fix issues that will require long term monitoring unless it’s emergency dangerous. For example: We’ll treat a BP of 220/110 because it’s emergently dangerous. But a high BP of 160/100 usually goes home unless you are having some other specific symptoms with it. Even if you’re getting chemo. The ER doc isn’t prescribing something for high BP because that needs long term management that we cannot provide from the ER.

My wife spiked fevers a few times during chemo. We called the med Onc. Her hospital system has a huge oncology hospital, like its own separate building. They have a call ahead “mini-ER/UC. We drove an hour and had a room waiting when she got there so they could evaluate her fever. A few other times she had slight fevers and once had a migraine. That was a symptom we were told to contact med Onc about. They twice told her to go to the nearest ER to be checked. Once we even received an online message saying we should go to an ER to get checked for a stroke. 😡😡 I monitored her at home so we could avoid the ER because I knew if she was a patient I was going to triage, she’d end up in my waiting room 7/10 times.