The Emergency Room, But Not an Emergency

       It’s the emergency room, but the situation does not feel all that scary.

       My wife has been suffering with a respiratory something. Our “primary-care physician” wants to make sure it isn’t a bacterial something. If he were to do the blood test in his office, we would have to wait a few days for the lab to send the results. So, we head to the emergency room—at 9:30 a.m. It is on the other side of town.

       I am not entirely a stranger to emergency rooms—having had a broken bone set or an unfamiliar symptom checked out upon occasion; having joined my aged mom there a few useless times after an overly jittery aide had called an ambulance.

       This time in the ER my wife, despite her honest account of some very non-acute symptoms, is gifted, quickly, with a doctor, the blood work and a chest X-ray. (Friend Neil suggests that the surest way to get prompt service in an emergency room is to report “severe chest pains.”)

       I don’t remember such efficiency on earlier visits. In fact, it seems to me—based on a sample of one—that emergency rooms have gotten better organized. I also don’t remember, on my earlier visits, everyone being so kind, concerned and solicitous.

      Perhaps it is just because we are now old and, therefore kindness, concern and solicitousness magnets.

      My own role as a dispenser of all of the above having become somewhat redundant, I am free to observe the scene. ERs—usually rich in crisis, pain, fear and compassion—can, of course, be quite interesting at those times when nervousness ebbs. Hence, that old TV show.

      Here, live and in person, a fellow with bloody bandages all around his head is wheeled in. I overhear that he fell while running on the street. As I eavesdrop, he fails the “what-city-is-this” and “what-year-is this” tests. But by lunchtime he is walking around with a small bandage on his forehead, as if his head and the asphalt had not so recently encountered each other.

      A middle-aged blond woman is hysterical more than she is anything else. Is she here because of a panic-inducing illness or is she here because of the hysteria? Dunno. Would be inappropriate to inquire. And, in real life, unlike on TV, no one here has any compulsion to satisfy your curiosity.

      My wife’s diagnosis arrives in a few hours.

      And, yes, her respiratory illness does prove to be bacterial—indeed, pneumonia. Which is not as bad as it sounds. It means, we are told, that antibiotics should be able to get rid of it.

      One thing about emergency rooms that I remember from earlier experiences is, however, that it is harder to get out of them than it is to get in.

      And it turns out a CT scan of her lungs and a urine test, “just to make sure,” would be good ideas—"just making sure” being a big part of the ethos of the emergency room. Fine. But these new tests take time to happen. And my wife—her condition only serious enough for a gurney in the hallway not for a room—is low priority in a situation totally dominated by the rules of triage.

      This worst-go-first sorting systems was apparently developed by the surgeon-in-chief of Napoleon's Imperial Guard near the end of the 18th century. It remains de rigueur on battlefields, in families with a lot of children and in emergency rooms—where it means, in essence, the less you need the care, the longer it takes for them to give it to you.

      We don’t arrive home until 5:30 in the evening.

      And, as we walk in the door, diagnosed and relieved, it occurs to me that one of these years my wife or I are going to be the ones in the ER who get attended to first.