“Sometimes real life takes over my fictional fantasies. I recently found myself in ambulance on the way to the ER after suffering a coronary spasm while driving my car. Not fun, I can assure you. The ambulance driver asked me if I’d been under any kind if stress. “Not really,” I said. After all, I had walked three miles that morning with my good pal, Phyllis, and that afternoon I planned to give a talk to a book club. Life was rolling along at a normal speed. I almost mentioned that Tessa and Claudine were driving me a bit batty, but I kept my thoughts to myself. Think about it. If that guy found out that Tessa and Claudine were fictional characters, he’d be sure to question my sanity.
Just for the record, I’m home and doing much better, but I must mention my twelve hours in ER land. Here goes: I was placed on a gurney in the hallway that was mobbed with doctors and nurses scurrying in every direction. The rooms were all filled. Gurneys covered every inch of space. A young doctor named Aaron stopped by and asked me a list of questions. He looked like he just stopped playing with his Brio train and didn’t need to shave. He took notes. I imagined him writing down. “Older woman. Typical chest pain case.. “I’ll report this to Dr. Rogers, my boss, he said and walked away. In side my head, I started humming, “Oh, its a wonderful day in the neighborhood…”
I got wheeled into a small room and hooked up to a heart monitor. My husband paced the floor. We were in a supply room which became a great people-watching center. We heard voices and saw all kinds of action outside the door. A new patient arrived, a woman on a gurney. “Ma’am, why did you call an ambulance,” an attendant asked.
“I was feeling lousy,” she said.
“Do you have pain in your chest?”
“No.”
“Any vomiting? Didn’t you say you’d been throwing up?”
“No, I never said that.”
“Did you fall?”
“No. I didn’t fall. My bones are just fine.”
“Why did you call?”
“I just did. I feel real bad.” The man sighed.
A male nurse took my blood pressure. He said they were trying to get a hospital room for me, but the hospital was full. My husband went out to get us a sandwich. After we ate, they moved me out of the supply room, rolled the gurney out the door. That’s when the real circus began. It was 9 pm, and life in the ER had begun to escalate.
I got wheeled past an African American man who refused to lie down on his gurney. Like a jack-in-the-box, he sat up. The nurses laid him back down. Up, down, up down. It continued. He talked in a loud voice. He pointed at me as we passed by. He jabbered and laughed, pointed at other patients, and shouted. It seemed he was flying high on something, feeling no pain. The other patients scowled, acting irritated at his noisy behavior.
“Cleveland, now just where did they pick you up this time?” the nurse asked.
“I don’t reckon I recall,” he said, with a sly grin. “I jes don’t recall.”
I made a trip to the restroom, right next to Cleveland’s gurney. I had left my long pants on. I’d seen enough people walk past with hospital gowns on, their rear ends hanging out. “Hey, girlie,” he said, pointing at me. I refused to make eye contact with him. When I headed back to my room, I noticed a husky, strong-looking police officer walking with a huge ER patient in handcuffs. Once this patient got onto an oversized gurney, they handcuffed him to the rails.
Barney, the transport nurse, kept busy wheeling patients to X-ray. He took me down the hall, on what he admitted was the hospital’s squeakiest gurney, for a chest X-ray and then brought me back. At this point, we’d been in the ER for nine hours. On the way back to my ER cubicle I watched as nurses and doctors rushed from patient to patient I saw all varieties of patients young, old, tall, short, fat, thin, Asian, Caucasian, Spanish, African American, and who knows what else. Cops hung out in every corner. A black woman over six feet tall walked in limping, her hands handcuffed behind her, a strong-looking female police officer at her side.
“Do you think my wife will get a room tonight?” my husband asked a nurse.
“I’ll check,” she said. “She’s been here a long time. A lot of people won’t.” She came back an hour later and said, “Consider yourself lucky. You’ve got a room. It still needs to be cleaned, however.”
We left the ER after 12 1/2 hours. I felt like I’d had enough real life for one day.
