The old man set bags of vegetables on the floor, and lay down beside them.
Sudden consternation: nurses hurried over, gasping and calling for help. A young doctor scolded, “You can’t lie down on the floor in an emergency room! The floor is filthy!” A group of white coats gathered around the old man and staggered with him to a nearby bed on wheels.
“I guess he knew how to get a bed,” the lady next to me said.
I nodded, and grimaced in pain. I had been in the emergency room for three hours now, unable to move my leg from pain. That morning my internist had told me to go to the emergency room; perhaps I had deep-vein blood clot. There, I climbed, groaning, onto an examination table where a doctor poked and prodded, finding no thrombosis, but not finding any other cause, either. So I sat in the waiting room, where I waited, and waited, and waited. I was only 50, but I think I gained a couple of extra years each hour or so. Nurses gave me pain killer after pain killer, but nothing had helped so far.
I watched the old man. The young doctor stood next to his bed, talking on a phone. He hung up, and flung his hands into the air.
“I told his wife that her husband thinks he’s having a heart attack, and she won’t come in.” He left, calling out to the nurse that he was going to get a social worker. The nurse started to check out the old man’s information on her computer.
Another hour dragged by. My leg hurt more and more. A really young doctor came over to draw blood. He fumbled with the tubes, and dropped one on the floor. A nurse passed by, carefully looking straight ahead, and hissed from the side of her mouth, “From the left arm, remember,” but he had already plunged the needle into my right arm. Blood dripped onto the chair arm, smearing his coat and my sleeve: he had forgotten to put the little glass tube at the other end. At least it was a distraction from my pain; I smiled at him, trying to be encouraging. He looked embarrassed, and fumbled with the tube. (When I told my internist this story, he smiled, and said, “I remember those days.”)
My husband Tuvia finally extricated himself from work and arrived, charging into the emergency room, his chassidic coat floating behind him. He went from nurse to doctor to nurse, trying to get a diagnosis for me, or a bed, or something, but finally just sat next to me and commiserated. We waited.
Sudden consternation. The old man had gathered his bags and was walking out of the hospital.
“Stop!” a nurse called.
The nurse who had been on the computer ran over: she had found out that this man often appeared in emergency rooms with a suspected heart attack, only to leave soon after. The first nurse asked, “What do I do with all his paperwork?”
The young doctor shrugged. “Just store it in a file. He’ll be back sometime.”
Tuvia took this moment to approach the desk to try to get some kind of help.
“The orthopedist came in,” he said. “Come, you’re next.” He ran ahead to save me a place in line.
I stood up, lurching down the hall, and collided into an old man clutching a pole with in IV bag. We swayed back and forth in a jazzy little dance until a nurse came to rescue him; she put me into a wheelchair and took me down the hall to the orthopedist. After I climbed onto the examining table, which took a while, the doctor moved my leg up and down, right and left, while I jammed my hand into my mouth to mute my screams. I rested, panting, as the doctor told my husband that he wanted me to have an X-ray.