Writing Archive

"Bring Out Your Dead..."

I’ve been to the same ER room twice now, once in the winter for a really bad earache and this past Sunday night for extreme stomach pain. I don’t remember the hospital name, just how to get there in a taxi.

This time I hung out in hospital hell from around midnight to 10 in the morning. It was pretty awful, waiting there in paper-thin slippers and ass-open gowns, sweating on a stretcher in sheets heavily bleached over the ages.

People behind the gauze curtains on either side coughing, hacking for help, groaning and farting and speaking in tongues as the nurses from Trinidad and the Philippines kept a sense of humor that at times seemed uncaring, at others just right, enough to make a toothless, gurgling old woman laugh while lurching in and out of consciousness.

And then they came for blood and urine, to probe and look at me through machines

Laid out, I remembered waiting for a therapist and doctor six years ago at a public clinic in San Antonio. That felt like my most depressing moment ever, waiting all day for a doctor and praying for medication. Literally, praying.

And the waiting-room cohort of an AIDS patient with her partner, the pudgy Chicana with sunken, dark rings under her eyes, talking about not being able to sleep after her husband left, pushing a baby stroller listlessly back and forth. Or the woman with elbow-length, matted black hair whose head revolved as if on axis while legs twitched and fingers picked at her clothes.

And the half-white kid not 17 years old, telling me “We Chicanos got to stick together,” urging me to apply for a job at the clinic so we could kick it and meet his homies, talking about the medicine he took to keep from beating on people and how it’s hard to find anyone to trust in life.

Pretty pathetic, but that kid bummed smokes for me. More pathetic that it made me feel a little less alone?

In my humble piece of Chicago ER, in my gauzed-off square of tile and white towels and fluorescent glare, I tried to sleep. The hours ticked off slowly, with interruptions to get prodded and moved around, eventually displaced to an empty corner to give my spot to someone on a respirator, which made me feel foolish and greedy for my relatively slight pain.

Jagged sleep drifted me through time indistinct and achy, with breaks punctuated by powdered surgical gloves.

Hungry by morning and ready to try eating, I felt the tiny kindness of breakfast consume me, as a woman in designer glasses with a Caribbean accent and the patience to put up with my grumpy sarcasm brought me a tray. But after choking down the powdered eggs and hard toast, I was overwhelmed with weepy sentiment by the nurse’s thoughtfulness.

I wondered if, when I’m done working and doing the sum of whatever I’ll do in life, such small kindness from a total stranger will be all that I can hope for when I sit alone in a nursing home or terminal wing. I’m sure that little things like a fluffed pillow or a smile will seem then like treasures of kindness.

Over this summer, I’ve felt the weight of these past few years, their loneliness and dashed hopes and ultimate successes, experiences to learn from and be thankful for, all. But I’ve felt also the regret of sacrificing my personal life to keep a job. The times I went for whiskey alone on winter nights or, alternately, ignored my anxious solitude by working harder. That much harder.

I should be thankful, though, that on Monday morning I tore off my plastic patient bracelet and walked out of ER. Vague soreness and tender sentimentality persist.

But I just went running before I wrote this, moving steadily from a jog into a sprint, until I felt the ache of being alive, my lungs and heart and blood matching the life all around me.

Posted by Benjamin at July 11, 2006 10:07 PM