Emergency!

I hate hospitals. It’s not an irrational hatred or a paralyzing fear reaction, and it’s certainly not a lack of respect for the fine individuals who provide such necessary and life-saving care, but like most people I simply would prefer never to step inside one again. Of course, I rarely get what I prefer.

Sunday night one of those things happened that you can’t predict or plan. Rather than a quiet evening of television and an early bedtime that we were expecting, Connie and I ended up in the emergency room of Oak Ridge’s Methodist Medical Center with our daughter Ashlyn. She had been complaining about her stomach hurting throughout the afternoon, but as dusk began to fall it became more obvious that it was not just “something she ate.”

Since my aim here is not to write a medical mystery or a draw out the concern for her well-being, let me say upfront that Ashlyn is okay. The final diagnosis was that she had a cyst that was causing the pain and after a few days it should go away.

To borrow from Connie’s favorite quote, however, this is about the “journey, not the destination.”

Hoping to avoid a trip to the Emergency Room, we called our family doctor for some advice on Ashlyn’s malady. Of course, being the weekend, we ended up talking to the phone service and then to an intermediary person whose primary job seemed to be keeping us from talking directly to a medical professional.

There were several calls back and forth, each with a new list of questions and answers, and finally we were asked to have Ashlyn jump up and down. Apparently, this is a standard tool for over-the-phone diagnosis, because when she admitted that “yes,” her abdomen did hurt more after jumping, we were instructed to go to the hospital.

The emergency room experience is unlike any other, except maybe for the green room of The Jerry Springer Show during an episode entitled “Cousins Who Marry.” I am actually tempted to spend some evenings there with my camera so I can start the next Internet sensation: PeopleOfTheEmergencyRoom.com.

The lady at the registration desk was very professional. I assume she has seen and heard a lot over the years, so she has removed any sign of emotion or compassion from her face or body language. She questioned me in more detail than my last home loan application and then took my insurance card and driver’s license to make a copy. I was not surprised by this, but was concerned when she said I would not get them back until Ashlyn was discharged. I wanted to ask her why, but I was a little concerned that she was related to the “Soup Nazi” of Seinfeld and might say “no Emergency Care for you!” For the good of my daughter, I kept my mouth shut.

We had barely taken our seats in the waiting area when Ashlyn’s name was called out from across the room. We excitedly stood and made our way toward the sound of the voice but could not find where it came from. There were about five doors on that side of the room and none of them were open. We stood there dumbly, wondering if all three of us had somehow imagined it together.

After a few awkward minutes of feet shuffling, one of middle doors cracked open and a man’s head poked out. “Ashlyn Warford!” As soon as he said it, his head disappeared and the door shut again. It was a little disconcerting. Were we supposed to go in there? Or was he just practicing name pronunciations?

I went to the door and knocked. The man quickly opened the door and said, “Warford?” We nodded yes and he let us in. Once inside, he did not seem so anti-social, and even joked some with Ashlyn, who was smiling and laughing despite her abdominal pain. His tag said he was an RN, and he took Ashlyn’s vitals and description of her problem. He agreed that the symptoms appeared to suggest Appendicitis, and then informed us that they had received several ambulances in the last hour and had no beds available. They would get to us as soon as they could.

We returned to our seats in the waiting area and spent the next three hours watching a parade of interesting, sort of scary, oddly dressed characters come and go. I was surprised at how many came in wearing their pajamas, and mentioned to Connie that I would have to bleeding profusely or passed out not to throw on some clothes before going out in public.

While we and a few others walked in with a dazed and confused look on our face, searching for signs to tell us where to go and what to do, most of the people who entered that evening looked like they were visiting their grandmother’s house. They seemed to know where everything was, and several even knew each other. I felt like we had stumbled onto a reunion of some sort.

To keep ourselves occupied as the hours passed, we tried to guess which person of each new group was the actual patient in need of Emergency care. It was more difficult than you would think.

A young woman came in carrying a sleeping baby and was followed by a heavyset, older woman pulling an oxygen tank. The woman with the tank moved slowly and wheezed with each unsteady step. To the untrained eye she was the obvious patient, but I was a quick learner that night and put my money on the infant. I was right.

After signing in, the three sat nearby and I was amazed that the baby could continue to sleep over the constant hacking cough and coarse, honking whistle that accompanied every labored breath the woman made. The only time there was some quiet from that side of the room was when the woman staggered her way back outside to smoke a cigarette.

There were an abundance of “coughers” in the waiting room that night, and I told Connie that if a person wasn’t sick when they got there, they would almost definitely have something before they left. One woman was there before we arrived and continued to wait; called back at the same time we were, minutes after midnight. We tried to guess her ailment, but except for an occasional cough (which she refused to cover with her hand), she seemed in good health. She spent most of her time on her cell phone, laughing and talking. We could not understand why anyone would sit for so long if they didn’t have an actual “emergency” concern. I think I could wait until morning to see someone about a cough, but that’s just me.

After a while, it became obvious that this was not necessarily an “emergency room” for many of the people there that night, but their only form of health care available. Without insurance they couldn’t afford to see a doctor. Here, they could show up for almost anything and receive treatment.

A man and a boy who looked to be around ten years old had been waiting since we arrived and Connie and I were both touched by the father’s attentiveness. The boy was definitely sick. Pale and weak, he lay down beside his father and slept most of the evening. The father would occasionally lay his hand on the boys shoulder or carefully touch his brow. At one point he gently shook him and said that he had to go the bathroom and was sorry to wake him but he didn’t want him to be scared if woke up and he was not there.

Later, after hours of waiting, the boy sat up and his father felt his forehead with the back of his hand. “I think your fever has broke,” I heard him say. The boy said that he felt better. They waited twenty more minutes and with a quiet look at each stood and walked silently to the door and into the night. I nudged Connie and said, “They either heal you here or make you wait long enough to get better on your own.”

When the clock struck midnight and my patience neared a breaking point, we got called back to a room. While we thought that we were at last making progress, we had merely switched tracks to another slow train to nowhere. The waiting with a different view had begun.