Last Friday evening I had to take Sandra into the emergency
room. The way she likes to drink and fight it was bound to happen sooner or
later…OK, I made that last part up. I did take her to the ER but it wasn’t for
injuries sustained in a drunken brawl; she always wins her drunken brawls….alright,
I made that up too.
The point is I took her to the local ER around 6:30PM on a
Friday night. For the record, 6:30PM on a Friday night is the official
beginning of what is known as the “Weekend Freak Show” by emergency rooms personnel across the country. I
tell you this because nobody told us and we walked innocently into it expecting
professional medical care in a timely manner. I feel so silly even writing that
now.
It was a dark and stormy night (I always wanted to say that)
so I dropped Sandra off under the awning at the ER entrance. My plan was to waste
some time parking the truck so she would be well on her way to being treated by
the time I showed up. That worked about as well as Custer’s plan to surprise
Sitting Bull at Little Bighorn.
Sandra denies seeing it but when I walked into the ER that
night I would have sworn that I saw a guy juggling flaming bowling pins in my
peripheral vision, and I’m sure there were clowns. What I know I saw was a huge
room full of people; so many people.
There were old people in wheel chairs and babies in
strollers, sick people and injured people, people who were throwing up and
people who had fallen down (forgive me Dr. Seuss). There were people moaning, groaning, wheezing
and complaining; people were sitting, standing or laying down in every square
inch of the place.
There were guards…armed guards…in a hospital! Why were there
armed guards in a hospital?
What I didn’t see was my very uncomfortable wife receiving
any medical attention. I found her near the receiving desk sitting calmly
playing on her iPad. She showed me a piece of paper with the number 55 written
on it and she told me that she was waiting to be “triaged.”
Until then I’d always
associated “triage” with doctors and helicopters; I watched too much M*A*S*H as a
teenager, I guess. As I contemplated a helicopter coming in to lift us out of the
ER circus, someone yelled out “Number 55!” I was so relieved that she was going
to be seen and we were going to escape this madness.
Sandra disappeared behind a wall only to reappear a few
minutes later. She told me that they had just taken her vitals, her insurance
information and assessed her medical condition. The nurse had told her that
there were only a few people ahead of her and it wouldn’t be long.
It wasn’t until about three hours later that I figured out that “triage” was French for “a steaming load of crap.”
We took a seat among the jugglers, clowns and sword-swallowers in the waiting area where Sandra went back to
her iPad as I sat on my hands so I wouldn’t inadvertently touch my eyes or
mouth, certain that every surface in that room was alive with a flesh eating
virus mutating with that new bird flu.
I’m no germaphobe,
but within ten feet of us there were people hacking, wheezing all kinds of
nastiness and I was pretty sure I had already developed a sore throat. I’m no germaphobe but I might be a
hypochondriac.
When a screen mounted on the wall flashed the number 27,
everyone in the room looked at the number in their hand and many of us began to
weep. An elderly gentleman who was pushing his wife around in a wheelchair
asked, “What did it say? Was that number 43?”
Suddenly it occurred to me that maybe he had been my age
when they came in and we might never escape this nightmare! As they flashed
number after number, with the old guy yelling, “Was that 43? When are you going
to call 43?” I realized why they kept armed guards in the ER; they must be
holding people against their will! Why else would anybody ever stay in this madhouse?
After three hours of being ignored, Sandra and I came up with a daring escape plan that involved me yelling out, "The doctor went home sick so we're closing for the night!" then slipping out during the ensuing riot. Before we could pull it off, a nurse called Sandra’s number and, thankfully, she was finally treated for her
problem.
We made good our escape after six long painful hours of the Weekend
Freak Show; and that’s no “triage.”
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