NYC ER Part 2 (Page 1 of 1)

My hospital bed headboard was against a wall in the shape of a sharp-cornered U that was maybe 30 feet at the base and 40 up each arm.  All along the outer edge of the U stood beds topped with the sick and the bleeding, the wheezing and the crying: The blonde girl to my left — perhaps 20 years old — kept getting up from her gurney and pacing a line around it, hugging herself and sobbing. She occasionally climbed back into bed and drew her knees up to her chest, only to spring back to the floor in a moment and trace the same caged path around her stainless steel bedframe. Her wet hair hung in her face like a curtain and she never quit shaking or shedding tears.

I wondered about her.

Then two orderlies stopped at the foot of my bed. One of them nodded his head in the direction of the girl. “See her?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Raped.”

“No shit?”

“Yep,” he answered. “Bad, too.”

We all then — six male eyes — looked at the girl curled on her white-sheet bed.

The orderlies shook their heads and walked off and I looked away to the nurse’s station: It was the only place to direct my gaze that wouldn’t be offensive. I didn’t want to gawk as if passing by a fender-bender in the opposite lane.

And then a nurse marched up and yanked straight my arm and two-finger slapped my inside elbow bend. She had a needle the size of a mixing straw and when she popped my flesh with it the world went black — again.
The darkness peripherally receded then, slowly, like a dissolving funnel had been placed over each eye, and I came back to the light with the magnified face of the nurse close enough to kiss me. Her mouth was moving but I couldn’t hear what she was saying.

I thought she looked like my sister, and then my hearing returned: “… up … up … Wake up. Hello? You passed out again … Wait here…”

She left me and I blinked at the light and when I looked down the hallway I saw through a set of doorway windows my girlfriend, Jetta, peering in at me. She placed her hands on the glass and pushed and then held up her palms: “Locked out,” she mouthed.

I smiled, trying to reassure her, hoping she’d just gotten there, hoping she hadn’t seen me just fall out again. And mostly I lay cold and confused: I wanted Jetta with me, holding my hand, but I didn’t want her to see me so feeble. Already, the embarrassment was setting in, the feeling that all this was silly and that I should jump from bed and rip out my IV and leave behind this beeping, bleeding ward of suffering.

Jetta watched through the glass as the two orderlies who’d stood at the foot of my bed earlier unhooked me from the wall and began wheeling me down the hallway. They nosed me into a small room, big enough for four beds — the Critical Care Unit.

I was going in headfirst and backwards, so I couldn’t see who said, “There’s no space in here for him!”
The nurse who’d just stabbed me with the IV was beside me and she replied: “But he just passed out?”

“Look around.  Do you see any space in here?”

“But he just passed out.  Dr. Sou—”

I quit listening then: New York City is all about real estate, even in the case of emergency care, as I was learning — and as my nurse argued for my CCU admittance, I marveled at how even now people here were always arguing about inches. I could be dying, I thought, and what might keep me away from the care I needed would amount to the elbowroom necessary to slide my bed into.

I’d never been so homesick.

The argument ended finally and I was rolled into the CCU and re-strung, my monitor beeping again.

And then they wheeled in Carl.

“OH GOD OH JESUS OH GOD OH JESUS IT HURTS!”

He was embryo-curled, shirtless, shoeless, khaki pants stained and wrinkled and rolled up to mid-shin. The bottom of his feet, pink and clean, stood in such contrast, such shocking starkness to the rest of him: So young looking, those feet pads, and so juxtaposed with the rest of Carl, screaming — “JESUS GOD OH JESUS IT HURTS STOP THE PAIN” — and filthy and shoulder-blade thin. His hair sat on his head in grey clumps like rotting broccoli. He had thick slug-scars all over his back.

He howled in pain and a doctor drove a morphine line in his arm and three EMTs tried to hold him down… until the narcotic mushroom cloud hit his guts and erupted in a spray of yellow bile from his mouth and nose that smacked the wall like thrown paint.

“OH GOD OH JESUS!”

He was standing then, the EMTs ducking for cover, and I saw a thick scar that ran the entire length of his upper torso, stem to sternum.

He was close enough for me to smell his sweat.

“JUST STOP THE PAIN! OH GO—”

“Carl!  You quit that right this minute!”

A tiny bird of a woman, leaning over a black cane, grey headed, glasses nose-perched, shuffled into the ICU. “You hush now! And get back in that bed!”

Carl calmed and looked down and crawled back onto the bed, his bent-over old mother patting his shoulder.

“It hurts,” he said, pulling at an imaginary string on his chest.

“I know, but everybody else in here is hurtin’ too. You don’t hear them carrying on, do you?”

Carl, this full-grown man, 44 years old and with only six hours left to live, looked at his old mother as his first round of morphine lulled his blood, slowed his breathing: “No ma’am.  I’m sorry.  But it hurts…”

finished next issue