by Joe Kennedy
Never spend a night in the emergency room. Not if you can avoid it. Drive safely, behave soberly, follow your doctor’s (or nurse practitioner’s or physician assistant’s) advice, avoid conflict and take care of yourself. Do everything you can to stay out of the ER unless you absolutely need to go there.
If you need it, of course use it. But don’t be like me, a stroke survivor who, partly out of fear and panic and partly out of necessity, has turned up in the ER more often than I would have had I practiced better self-care.
If you do end up there with your wits intact, then cooperate with the staff, think about how you got there and be honest with ER personnel when they ask you what’s going on.
Confine your answers to pertinent information.
I popped into the ER one night not long ago and overheard enough quiet exchanges between docs and patients to feel shocked by the many confessions of non-compliance that took place.
People hadn’t taken their meds for diabetes, hadn’t stayed on their heart-healthy diets, hadn’t gotten the recommended hours of sleep or minutes of exercise.
None of the talkers was visible to me. All were concealed behind curtains and other barriers between ER department beds. Their medical revelations reminded me that I’m not overly diligent about my regimen, either.
More interesting were the customers’ comments about relationships. Suffering and betrayal seemed to have visited every door. “I loved her to death, but she cheated on me,” a young-sounding man told a visitor, not, one suspects, for the first time.
“They say I’m obsessed with Kathy but I’m not,” a senior woman in another spot insisted. A moment later, she summed up another person’s relationship by saying, regretfully, “Liynn was too nice a woman.” I was tempted to say, “I know what you mean.”
While the customers spilled their deep secrets, the staff carried on without rolling a single set of eyes. Their behavior was so professional it left me wondering whether their degree work included a semester of imperviousness training.
I’m trying to sound entertaining, but the ER is not a place you’d enjoy, though it can be diverting at times. Simply by paying attention to the conversations of the nursing staff, EMTs and others I learned a lot about City Market restaurants, current movies and public events I might be interested in.
It was also fertile ground for a would-be novelist in search of plots — which I am not. In general, The tenor of the customers’ comments, including mine, brought one of Mark Twain’s famous quotes to mind: “When you remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.”