A while back I spoke of taking a rather frightening fall in my bathroom and hitting my head so hard on the bathtub that it sounded like the crack of a baseball hat sending a ball into the air. I went to bed that night but checked with my doctor the following morning because my head hurt and I had a number of unusual aches in multiple areas of my body. He advised me to visit the Methodist Hospital Emergency Center near where I live so I followed his advice and headed that way.
The parking lot was already filled with cars so that did not bode well in terms of wait time, but I had my phone to keep me entertained for however long I would be there. There were a couple of people ahead of me waiting to check in, including a young man who had brought his mother whose blood pressure was quite high. He was quite concerned that she was having trouble breathing. I
t took quite a bit of time for him to provide proof that he would be able to pay for the visit so I sat patiently waiting for my turn to get on the list of anxious souls waiting to be seen. All the while I found myself observing the people who were in the big room with me. I knew from my daughter who once worked as a nurse in a downtown Chicago hospital and from watching “The Pitt” that people are given access to care not in the order in which they arrive, but in the seriousness of their condition.
It did not surprise me that they took the lady who was struggling to breathe before any of the people who had already been there. What did make me wonder was how quick my registration process was compared to the poor soul who had been just in front of me. I did not have to do much of anything to get my name placed in line.
I went back to the chair where I had been waiting and only a few minutes passed before I was ushered into the inner sanctum of the place. All of the beds were filled but I was able to walk on my own and showing no signs of inability to navigate so I ended up in a hallway also filled with people. We at least had a modicum of privacy with screens blocking our view of each other. When medical people came to talk to us they spoke in soft voices so that nobody would hear our personal information. It was a nice quiet place to be so I settled into the long wait that would consume most of my day by playing my word games and scrolling through Substack and Facebook to find out what was happening in the outside world.
The care and attention that I received was outstanding. The staff was apologetic for the long wait but I could see with my own eyes how many people they were attempting to serve. In between this experience and the multiple times of late that I have been in emergency rooms with my father-in-law I understand the volume of cases that medical staffs must deal with from one hour to the next on any given day. How they maintain their calm and composure is beyond me. Theirs is a world of suffering and sometimes even angry souls hoping to find the solace that they need in moments that can be frightening.
The hours ticked by before I finally had CT scans of most the bony areas on the right side of my body that had felt the hard blows of the tile floor and bathtub. The tech who took the pictures was so sweet and pleasant even as she explained that it might take a few hours or for the images to be read and interpreted. So back I went to my chair where a nurse periodically took my vitals and offered me pain medication for my headache. All the while I listened to the sounds of humanity that echoed through the building.
I heard the young pregnant girl in the nook that was next to me speaking with concern about how her baby was doing. I caught the coughs and wheezes of an asthmatic child whose lungs needed to be cleared. I watched the quick reaction of the staff to a man whose heart was acting in an erratic manner. I listened to the moans of people in pain. Somehow I was in a kind of microcosm of the world with people of different races and cultures and economic status all waiting like me to hear the truth about what if anything was wrong with them. Keeping us all feeling important were nurses and doctors and technicians and even people cleaning the area who behaved with a calm confidence even as they must have been feeling exhausted from the volume of folks seeking care.
I ended up being mostly okay. There were no fractures on any of my bones or in my skull. There were no signs of blood clots that might break loose and head for my brain or heart. I only had the usual curvature of my spine, the arthritis of my hip and a small bulge in my back, all of which I was already treating with exercise and a pending knee replacement. They also found that I had a urinary tract infection. I left with a prescription for the infection and for some extra strength Tylenol for my soreness. When I checked to see what I owed I was waved through and told that everything was fine.
I thought about the younger people who had been there. I worried about the woman having trouble breathing who was sent away rather quickly. I wondered what would happen with the pregnant woman and if she and her baby would be okay. I thought of the worried looks of those whose insurance was obviously not as good as mine who handed over credit cards before being cleared to leave. I realized how dedicated our healthcare professionals are but how broken the system that they must work in actually is. I saw that my good fortune is not universal and somehow that felt very unfair.
The nurse had told me how strong I appeared to be. For most of my life that has been quiet true. It is the reason that my mother never had to take me to see a doctor. I grew up without annual checkups and received my vaccinations from a free clinic. My mother was a widow with little or no income and certainly no health insurance until much later in her life. Luckily me and my youngest brother rarely needed any kind of medical attention. The funds for such things were mostly reserved for my middle brother who suffered with asthma and often became as sick as the child that I heard in the emergency center.
I suspect that even today there are many Americans who rarely partake of visits to doctors unless they become seriously ill. They cannot afford the cost of healthcare even when they carry insurance. The visits that only cost me twenty dollars will often amount to hundreds or even thousands of dollars for younger people who are already paying outlandish amounts for health insurance that they use only in serious emergency situations. I doubt that many of them would have the luxury of just checking to determine how dangerous a hard blow to the head would be.
I don’t take my good fortune for granted nor do I believe that I should be in the only segment of our society that is able to keep up with the changing nature of my health. Good medical care should be a given in a nation as rich as ours. The fact that a significant percent of the population and lawmakers think that it does not matter if some people do not have the resources to get the care they need is a travesty. Too many of the folks in the same place that I was probably went into debt simply because they became sick. We need to fix this problem for good and for all!
All It Takes Is A Little Love 