Here's why there wasn't more posting Friday. I spent most of yesterday in a hospital emergency room. I've been to this building so many times that at dinner time, as I was going through the line in the cafeteria there to purchase dinner, the cashier actually said to me, "You get the employee discount, don't you?"
My mother, who's the reason I keep going to these places, is home and doing okay now. But it was a rough day for both of us — her, more than me, obviously. But it was rough for me, too. The only good thing I can say for the experience is that when you hang around a hospital emergency ward, you pick up a lot of "slice of life" anecdotes. I told one here and I have a couple of new ones.
We were waiting for my mother to be admitted and I believe we were the next to be called. Suddenly, elsewhere in the waiting room, a stout black woman passed out, right on the floor. A security guard called inside and an intern came running out with a gurney, and she was quickly wheeled in for treatment, ahead of us and everyone else. I instantly got two impressions. One was that she had faked the collapse on the floor in order to get in right away. It was not a display of Lee Strasberg sensitivity; more like Roger Corman and one of those prison pictures shot in the Phillipines. That level of acting. The other impression was that the intern knew she was faking but since he couldn't prove it, he had to operate on the assumption that it was legit.
An hour or so later, I was sitting in front of the cubicle wherein my mother was being treated, and the stout black lady walked past me, on her way to the toilet to try and fill a specimen bottle. As she passed, I said, "Nice performance out there," and she didn't even break stride. She just said, "Hey, you do what you have to in this world," and kept on going. Somehow, I don't think she had any trouble filling that bottle.
In the meantime, there was a female security guard more-or-less watching the cubicle next to where we were, and I got into a conversation with her. The patient within was a semi-coherent woman who'd been brought in by the police, complaining of "brain injuries." Her boy friend, she mumbled, had inflicted them. He had been beating her and hitting her for years now, and this was not the first time she'd been in this emergency ward due to his handiwork.
So why did they need to have a security guard watching her in there? Was someone afraid "the boy friend" would get in and resume smacking her around in a hospital emergency room? No, the guard explained. It was to keep her from sneaking out of the ward and hurrying back to Mr. Wonderful. This, the guard said, is not uncommon: "They suddenly realize someone is talking about going and arresting the S.O.B. and they either get worried about losing him or afraid that he's going to get mad at them and make their lives even more miserable." The lady in question had done that every time she'd been in before. There was also the worry that she would do something suicidal there…which wouldn't have been all that different from going back to her beau.
As usual for these places, I was impressed with the skill and efficiency of most of the doctors and nurses, less so with the paper shufflers and administrative folks. It's almost like some hospitals feel the need to balance the competence of their medical personnel with people who can't do much more than repeat routing procedures they've been taught.
And as usual, I was unimpressed with the food in the cafeteria. I had a piece of poached salmon and a scoop of macaroni and cheese…and I think I know which was which, but it took a bit of study. Oh — and later, I was in a roomful of vending machines and I attempted to purchase a bag of Baked Lays from one of those devices where you put in your money, punch the code number and the product drops into the slot at the bottom…only, my Baked Lays didn't drop properly. The bag got wedged on the bottom row of products and though I tried to jiggle the machine, I couldn't get it to drop the rest of the way into the dispensing slot. I tried and tried…and then a man in surgeon's garb (green scrubs) came up behind me and said, "Let me give it a try," and he banged the door a few times. Sure enough, around the fifth bang, the chips dropped into the chute where I could get them.
I thanked him and said, "For a minute there, I thought you were going to have to perform a Caesarian."
He said, "If only deliveries were all that easy."