Emergency Room (3 page)

“
Urgent
means they took him straight to treatment,” Mary said, decoding the scribbles on Diana’s work sheet, “so you won’t find him in the Waiting Room. These numbers here are the ambulance code. They tell you what part of town Mr. Williams was brought from. The
W
means he’s white. That’ll help us find him; we won’t be looking for anybody black or Hispanic.”

Help us find him? thought Diana. There weren’t really rooms in the ER — just numbered, curtained partitions — but how could a patient be lost and have to be found?

Mary kept on. “This little check mark tells you the police are involved. So you don’t want to assume you’re safe around Mr. Williams. Make sure he’s restrained.”

Diana was not too sure she wanted to associate with somebody who might not be safe and needed to be restrained.

“There’s only a last name,” Mary said, “so probably he’s too drunk to remember his first name.”

“How do you know he’s drunk?”

“That’s what ETOH means. I forget what that stands for. Alcohol, I guess.”

Down in the treatment area, a washable wall chart was Magic Markered with patients’ last names and room numbers.
WILLIAMS
had no number, only the letter
H
. “Hall,” explained Mary. “Drunks just get lined up because we have so many. Look for a broken nose.”

The inner wall running down the Medical to Surgical wing was lined with stretchers, onto which men were fastened with leather bracelets, ankle grips, or twisted ropes made of bedsheets. Diana usually clung to the opposite wall when she walked here, because these patients were prone to smelling, swearing, and spitting. She had never run an errand involving the hall patients and could not imagine actually having to talk to one of them.

In the ER, patients were either “attractive” or “not attractive.” It was easier for the staff to be sympathetic to a clean, well-spoken person who’d had an unfortunate accident than to a filthy stinking drunk who got scraped off the sidewalk week in and week out. The people lining these halls were very thoroughly “not attractive.”

Diana did not think she knew how to look for a broken nose, but when they found Mr. Williams, she did. His nose had been crushed right back into his face. Blood had dried all over his shirt and turned the sheets red around his head. He looked dead to Diana, who wanted to cry.

Mary displayed no interest in Mr. Williams’s possible pain. “Mr. Williams!” she yelled, grabbing his arm and shaking him.

Mr. Williams’s eyes opened. “Whuh.”

“What’s your first name, Mr. Williams?”

“Whuh.”

“Where do you live, Mr. Williams?”

“Whuh.”

“Mr. Williams!” yelled Mary. “Answer me! What’s your first name?”

“André.”

Diana filled in “André.”

“Now ask him where he lives,” Mary told her.

“Where do you live, Mr. Williams?” asked Diana politely.

Two doctors and a nurse walking by laughed at her. She blushed and felt stupid.

“Yell,” Mary told her.

Of course Seth had to choose this moment to reappear. He leaned against the far wall, arms crossed in a leisurely superior fashion, laughing at her for the second time in ten minutes. This isn’t fair! thought Diana, cheeks scarlet with confusion and embarrassment. I didn’t volunteer so I could get street addresses from drunks! “Where do you live, Mr. Williams?” she said again, and got no response. Finally she really yelled. “
Where do you live, Mr
.
Williams
?”

Mr. Williams told her where to go.

Diana turned pale.

The nurse who had laughed came back, grabbed Mr. Williams’s arm, and shouted, “You tell her where you live or I’ll leave you strapped to this stretcher for the next ten years, buddy!”

Mr. Williams grinned beneath his crushed nose. To Diana’s surprise it was a friendly grin, and she found herself grinning back at him. “Texas,” he said.

“Oh, right,” said the nurse sarcastically. “What are you doing two thousand miles away then?”

“Giving you a hard time.”

Everybody laughed, even Diana. Mr. Williams told her where he really lived (three blocks away) and to Diana’s surprise, he said, “Hey, honey, I didn’t mean to scare you. I had one too many.”

“You had ten too many,” said the nurse. “Who hit you, anyway?”

“My girlfriend’s boyfriend,” said Mr. Williams. He winked at Diana. Diana thought it sounded like the sort of situation where you would get a broken nose even if you hadn’t had ten too many.

On the way back to Insurance, Diana said to Mary, “Why didn’t we just let him sleep? Why did we put him through that? Shaking him and yelling at him?”

“We have to know which Mr. Williams this is,” said Mary. “Say we’ve treated fifty men named Williams this year. Say we’re guessing this guy is a drunk with a facial injury. But say what we don’t know is, he’s actually diabetic. He could die from the wrong treatment. So we want the right Patient Record for the doctors to look at before they prescribe. Plus, it’s nice if the Mr. Williams who is actually here is the Mr. Williams who gets billed for being here.”

At Knika’s desk, Mary grabbed another form and handed it to Diana. “I’ll put Mr. Williams in the computer,” said Mary, “while you do the next one. Don’t screw up.”

Mary vanished into her cubicle.

Knika talked fiercely into her telephones.

Barbie helped a limping old man into a wheelchair.

Two minutes of training. That was it. A world-famous, world-class hospital, where if Diana got the wrong information, some innocent patient would die.

A
NNA MARIA REFUSED TO
cry. She was too old for that and anyway, she had been in charge plenty of times without tears.

It was just that without electricity, the tiny apartment was so scary.

The lights wouldn’t go on, the television wouldn’t work, the radio didn’t play. The stove didn’t heat and the refrigerator didn’t keep things cold.

It was hard not to cry. Tears filled her up, not behind the eyes, where they belonged, but inside her chest, making a well of hot water that threatened to drown her.

The streets were dangerous at night. It was not safe to be out there. Night began early in the City. As the sun lowered in the sky, it was hidden quickly by tall buildings. Long shadows darkened the little apartment. Anna Maria wanted to go outside so much it was a cry from her heart. Outside there would be people and talk and laughter.

Usually, nights, they got that from TV and radio. But not without electricity. Mama said it was her fault they didn’t have electricity, because Mama hadn’t paid the bill. She said in winter they didn’t cut you off, but in summer they did.

Anna Maria felt so very cut off. As if huge cruel scissors had taken away all sound and light and hope.

The walls closed in and the heat was suffocating.

It was still light out and the quiz shows with their laughing emcees, or the reruns with their familiar leads, would be on now if she had a television. But she didn’t. The hours stretched ahead of Anna Maria, black and silent and scary.

She did not know when Mama would be home. Mama never said. So they had Froot Loops for supper.

Anna Maria fixed Yasmin’s hair, braiding it carefully. Then she filled a baby bottle with red Kool-Aid and stuck José into the stroller, his little hands wrapped around his bottle. Together she and Yasmin bumped the stroller down four flights of stinking, narrow, unlit stairs.

The sidewalk was bumpy and Anna Maria kept having to tilt the stroller to keep the wheels going. Yasmin danced the whole way. Yasmin had new shoes from the Salvation Army store and the heels were hard. She had never had hard-soled shoes before, only sneakers, and she loved the taps that the new shoes could make. Yasmin wanted to dance more than anything. A few blocks from their apartment was a dancing school, and Yasmin liked to pretend she went there.

José sucked on the bottle without tipping the Kool-Aid into his mouth. He would save the liquid for later; now he just wanted the comfort of the nipple in his mouth.

They walked quite a few blocks. Nothing happened to them. This was partly because Anna Maria was holding very tightly to the gold cross on her necklace, and partly because it was too early for people to be really drunk or really high or really dangerous.

It wasn’t even dark enough for the streetlights to come on yet. Anna Maria hated streetlights. Most of them didn’t work anyway, and the ones that did cast a sick pool of yellow that turned the faces of strangers into vampires.

Last year they had spent a lot of evenings at the public library because the children’s room was friendly. But the library had run out of money, too. Anna Maria thought of the books in there, silent and closed like the doors. You never thought a library could close.

If a library could close, maybe even a hospital could close.

Anna Maria shivered.

The flimsy stroller caught on a crack in the sidewalk, and she was horrified for a moment that a wheel had broken. How could they replace the stroller? Yasmin knelt beside the wheel, extricated it, and got it started again. Anna Maria drew a breath of relief.

Just ahead was the neon sign she wanted:

EMERGENCY ROOM

She had been here plenty of times. Never on her own, though. But she knew several things about the Waiting Room at City Hospital.

It was air-conditioned.

It had a working television on the wall.

It was full of people and noise and things to watch.

There was a water fountain to drink from. They gave you crayons and paper while you waited.

Anna Maria paused briefly where the sidewalk curved beneath huge pillars. People were lined against the walls smoking cigarettes because you weren’t allowed to smoke inside a hospital. Two ears pulled up, and people got out and walked into the ER. Either they weren’t too sick to walk, or else they were visiting other people who were. Then the drivers drove on to the parking lot. A security guard came out, his hand resting lightly on the butt of his gun while his radio, on the other hip, shouted with static.

Anna Maria took Yasmin’s hand and pushed the stroller forward. Big silent glass doors opened automatically when their combined weight triggered the controls.

On the other side of the doors she quickly assessed the situation. The Admitting Nurse was taking somebody’s pulse. The desk secretary was answering phones. The inside security guard was yelling at a drunk.

Anna Maria slid past a man in a wheelchair, two fat women reading old magazines, and a pregnant woman with tears rolling down her cheeks.

Anna Maria sat down in one of the plastic seats and pulled the stroller in close. Yasmin hung onto the stroller handle and looked around. José sucked on his bottle.

Oh, it was so nice in here! The air was cool and comfortable. The fat women looked friendly. Somebody had abandoned a bag of potato chips on the coloring table. Anna Maria would wait a little bit and if nobody came, she would share the chips with her brother and sister.

The TV was showing the news.

Anna Maria would not have chosen the news herself, but she loved being talked to, and the man on Channel 8 was talking in that warm, solid, comforting way.

Nobody noticed the children.

They were safe. They could stay hours, as long as José was good.

José was two.

Yasmin was four.

Anna Maria was eight.

D
IANA PRAYED THERE WERE
family members in the Waiting Room to give her the necessary statistics. She stood on the rim of the packed room, as nervous as a bungee jumper on the edge of his bridge. “Sczevyl?” she whispered. Funny-looking name. What if it was spelled wrong, or she was saying it wrong? It didn’t matter, nobody so much as glanced at her. Whispering in the Waiting Room was clearly ridiculous. She, who hated to raise her voice and be obvious, had to shout. “Sczevyl!” she yelled, pronouncing it “shovel.”

If there were family members in the Waiting Room, they didn’t pronounce it shovel. Therefore, she had to find the patient.

Diana went back to Mary, hoping for help on her second work sheet as well. “What exactly does this mean — urgent, female, psychotic, abusive, swearing?”

Mary surveyed the sheet. “Offhand, using medical terminology, I’d say the woman’s nuts.”

Diana tried to laugh.

“It means she was fighting,” explained Mary. “Fighting probably means kicking, screaming, biting, hitting. That kind of stuff. See the check in this box? Police are involved.”

“Neat.”

Mary laughed. “She’ll be in CIU. Crisis Intervention Unit. That’s supposed to sound less threatening than calling it Psychiatric. The door’s that big thick slab of glass at the end of Hall Four. It’s locked. You have to knock. Guards let you in and let you out. Don’t be scared.”

Don’t be scared.

Right.

Diana actually squared her shoulders to walk down the hall to CIU. Her hands were sweating and her knees hurt. She wanted to be a doctor, but she wanted her patients to be clean, neat people who talked normally.

Crisis Intervention Unit? What kinds of crises were they intervening in? And did she, Diana, wish to intervene?

What if she intervened when a fist or a foot was lashing out? Not to mention a gun or a knife?

Seth fell into step with her. “So how’s Insurance?”

Diana was sorry that Seth was so attractive. His looks kept provoking her interest. She wrenched her thoughts and eyes away from Seth’s buttons. “It’s pretty interesting. I haven’t actually done any insurance. What have you been doing?”

“MVAs and GSWs,” said Seth casually. Motor vehicle accidents and gunshot wounds.

Diana put him down instantly. She had time to stop herself but didn’t. “You mean they admitted an MVA and a GSW. I asked what
you
did.”

Seth put on his usual big sprawling Texas-sized grin. “Nothing,” he admitted. “They kicked me out of Trauma. I hardly got to see a thing.”

“Did you see the gunshot wound itself though?” whispered Diana. She didn’t want anybody to overhear; how perverted she would sound, hungering after the sight of a GSW. What did it really look like? A round hole? No chest where once a chest had been?