ER Daytrip

(archived from July 22 2007)

I like hospitals. And now I know why.

Yesterday I had an appointment with the Doctor and after answering a few questions honestly (learned my lesson) it was off to the hospital for me. I won’t bore you with the details except for the fact that there was talk of putting a filter in one of my veins and all I could think of is the filter that keeps getting clogged on the lawn mower and I have to scrape off the oil residue to keep it running. Great; I’m going to be looking for a flat head screwdriver every time I’m short of breath. 

 

I went in with a book (still reading the 911 interviews by Chomsky) thinking I would be in the waiting room for hours, but surprisingly I went almost directly into the triage and then to the admitting window. I guess the Friday night rush of drunks and disappointed partiers hadn’t gotten started yet.

I then went back to the nearly empty waiting area and found a seat expecting the 11 hour sit-in to begin. A man pushed his girlfriend into the room in a wheel chair. She was considerably younger than he was and I guess he could have been her father, but they spoke with a familiarity and an ease that I just figured they were a couple. I couldn’t tell why she was there, but she had a red band and mine was blue so I figured she had to be worse off than me. Then I remembered what code Blue meant. I thought of the lawn mower again.

A little ways down from them were these two guys that were obviously friends. The one in the wheel chair was about 34, but you know, a young 34. Why is it that when I was a kid 34 year old people were adults and when I was 34 I was watching Star Trek? We are a generation of responsibility challenged adults. It’s Doctor Spock’s fault. We should have been beaten into maturity.

The guy in the wheel chair had a busted ankle. I mean busted. We talked and it turned out that he was a painter and had suffered the accident when the ladder started slipping. I can tell you from experience, that is not a good feeling and it seems to last a real long time. You notice real quick how flimsy the stupid ladder really is and how far up on it you idiotically climbed. And you know that there is just not going to be a pleasant end to the ordeal. His end came on the concrete slab 2 stories down.

Funny thing was, just like a guy, he went back to work. It happened 2 days before he went to the hospital. The swelling finally got to the point that his foot wouldn’t fit in his work boot. So then, of course we had to compare swollen legs. Mine won for the amount of swelling and his for the discoloration of serious internal injuries. He broke his foot and kept on working.

We had something else in common; we were both afraid of the chickenhead that was spewing up liquids in the other waiting room. When she came in to use the restroom, we both thought of leaving the hospital with our ailments intact. What ever she had was far worse than the possible outcome of another day of medical procrastination.

But luckily, for me, a nurse’s aid came and rescued me from the spewage, and I cut and ran and left my new found friend to his own devises. I never saw him again and can only assume the worse.

They took great care of me. Ran me around to all the various tests and such. Each person I came into contact with was very pleasant. I thought about what a factory these hospitals are. Each person does a very specific task and each part of the process is refined and honed to maximize efficiency. The Sonogram was a fine example.

I was rolled into the Sonogram room and left in the receiving hall against the wall waiting for the technician to run my test. When I worked at Showman fabricators in New York, we would build set pieces and put them on dollies and roll them to the next station for sanding, paint-prep, or the tech area for assembly. We would always leave them in the right place but against the wall and out of the way for the next person to get to when ready.

The door opened and this cute 30ish Sonogram tech rolled out another 30ish something red head patient on a gurney-bed. They put her against the other wall and as the tech rolled me into the room I joked that we were like two infants passing in our baby-buggies. If that was my idea of flirting, I think I need some real work on it.

The cute tech told me to take off my shorts and get back on the bed. And of course, that’s what I did. As I was getting back on the bed she stepped out for a second, for what I thought was to get some of that warm lube stuff, yeah, lube stuff, and just when I thought I really liked the hospital, the door opened and Steve walked in. Apparently Steve is the “other” Sonogram technician. Now, Steve did have the warmed lube stuff, but that of course is a very different matter all together (Egreggeous, get your mind out of the gutter. It was for my femoral artery in my leg).

After being very disappointed and then wheeled back to the ER like so much scenery, an interesting thing happened. I got into a conversation with a nurses aid would had done two years in Iraq as a Marine and was there in 2004-2005. He had a unique perspective as that he was of Pakistani decent and a practicing Muslim. Shia to be exact.

We had a long conversation about the conditions on the ground there; what he had seen and done. We talked about what the soldiers had been feeling about the invasion back in 2005 and that morale had only gotten worse since he left. He remains in contact with those friends still there and appears to have some remorse about leaving them. But he’s still in the guard and going to school here now.

I could gather from his eyes that even as knowledgeable as I am about the reality of the situation there, I couldn’t even come close to understanding it. What was really hard for him to come to terms with was that the Iraqi’s were a strong and proud people. Sure they lived under Saddam, but they had held together a mixed nation of Sunni, Shia, and Kurd under a secular government. They were proud of this. He talked about Sunni and Shia mosques right across the street from each other and neighborhoods that were mixed. They took pride in it. They had a powerful sense of national pride and it looked as if it broke his heart to see this once proud people reduced to this.

And he was part of it.

We talked in depth about Cheney and the lead up to the war. We talked about the Pakistani Supreme Court Justice that was put back behind the bench after the President tried to remove him. We talked about the tight rope that Pakistan was walking between Western and Islamic influences.

Then his boss walked by and he had to go find something to do.

I’m such a juvenile when it comes to nurses. I always develop these stupid little crushes on them. But this nurse was just hot. Smart and cheerful with a glimmer in her eye that just made me want to swear my undying devotion to wash all of her sheets by hand for the rest of my life.

As the rest of the aides were hooking me up to various machines that go “bing” she just calmly sat next to me and asked the pertinent questions I had been answering endlessly since I got there. But, of course this time, I really didn’t mind. My mind wondered as I detailed the reasons for the physical demise that landed me there. I wondered if she read in bed, propped up against the head board with the reading lamp on the night stand. If her living room was girly or if she was sloppy like me. I wondered what she liked for breakfast. What she wanted to be when she grew up.

Hospitals attract certain types. Had I the ability to step far enough out of myself, I might fall into one of the classic characters, myself. But to work there, in a supporting roll, you have to be a certain type of person. There is no amount of money that could make most of us do what they have to on a daily basis. What they see and endure at times must be very difficult to leave at the office. But they come back for another 12 hour shift.

In that hospital on that day, there was a tangible sense of decency. There was a connection to other people and a desire to help. From the moment I walked in I could feel it. Everyone could. It wasn’t about money or insurance or profit margins, it was about people and our undeniable connection to each other. Here in this factory something living was growing up through a crack in the concrete slab floor; us.

I like hospitals. And now I know why.

(A year after I wrote this, University Community was privatized. Very different now)