Emergency Room Redux

A nasty dog bite sent me to the emergency room on Memorial Day. The first time I went to an emergency room, I was three years old and had blacked out after I'd tried an experiment involving an electrical outlet and a hairpin. What I remember from that trip was my surprise at seeing grown-up strangers wearing pajamas in the public waiting room. All that intimacy among strangers.They seemed to lack the purpose and drive I was used to seeing in adults. Yet, they weren't relaxing, the way my father did when he'd come home from work. They seemed more like me, a child, waiting to be called by whoever was running the place. I wondered, had they done something wrong too?

By the time my husband died seven years ago, I'd become quite familiar with ERs, each one seeming like a clone of the one I knew best at Sloan Kettering. They were all set up similarly. It didn't matter if we were in Pittsfield or Great Barrington or Manhattan, I knew by then what to expect from the many days and nights we had waited in one or another of those rooms. I'd learned to carry a sweat shirt and socks for the frigid temperatures and to give the strangers who shared the room with us some psychic space and pretend privacy. In such close quarters, I'd learned to focus on the television screen eternally blaring the "news," while ignoring the real news--people hurting and dying, new ones each time.

I'd learned to ask if there were any warm blankets for Al, and to offer to get one myself since the staff was too busy with paperwork and other patients. Since his heart hadn't stopped or his breath, or he wasn't bleeding, the wait could be very long. But I can't say that I learned patience. It was suspension that I practiced. Of thought. Of feeling. . . except hope. I never stopped hoping for one more save, until our last visit on his final weekend.

The overcrowded weekends still puzzle me. I can understand gunshot wounds and injuries from drunken brawls or accidents of children home from school, but why do so many people who are just minding their own business get so sick after 5:00 on Fridays until 8:00 Monday mornings? I realize that the answering services of off-duty doctors send them to ERs, but what I mean is why so many?

It's a child's question. The unanswerable why. I hear it from a distance, even though it comes from within. This place of crisis and angst stuns a part of me that apparently hasn't healed or moved on. The best I can do is isolate it and try to back away.

The mind is funny, isn't it, in its insistence on returning to the past. The trauma of the dog bite must have triggered my earlier memories, which remain so vividly real to me. I can't recall much about my recent visit to the emergency room in Hudson. It was practically a non-event. I do remember that I couldn't stop shaking, although it wasn't overly cold in there. My treatment was some minor cleaning, bandaging, and medication. My wait was short and my stay over quickly. Except for the scabs that are all that remain from the puncture wounds on my leg, no one would be able to tell it happened.