E. R.

We were about the same age. In my (and her) younger days E.R. stood for Elizabeth Regina. I am still the same fool, and she is still the Queen. But we are both older now and ER, at least for me, has come to mean Emergency Room. I do not know how Buckingham Palace handles such situations. For us commoners it gets tricky when you are sick because being sick is not an either-or decision like, say, being alive or being dead. You cannot be “just a little” dead. A woman cannot be “just a little” pregnant. In sickness there are variations. You wake up feeling sick, for example, but you take a Tylenol and by noon you are all right again. There was no need to call the doctor. You were just a little sick.

But then you may also wake up wretched. Your breakfast does not stay down. You go back to bed and sleep all day. And the following night. But the next morning you are better. You had almost called the doctor but now you are glad you did not. You would feel like a fool if you had made an appointment. This time you were just plain sick but it passed.

The next stage is when you are real sick. Your throat is scratchy and you shiver although it is not cold. You have no appetite, your belly aches, and you are too weak to lift a spoon, almost. Now comes the question: do you call the doctor? Before you do pause a moment to think. If you have lived long enough you know that anything you do, even calling the doctor, has consequences. There are several possible scenarios. Either you diagnose yourself and go to the emergency room. As you probably know, that alone is a stressful event and it takes all day to get out again, in the best of circumstances. It is also embarrassing because minutes after you touch 911 you hear the siren. An ambulance rushes around the corner, followed by a lumbering full-sized fire engine and, for all you know, an ambulance-chasing TV transmission van to set the neighbors wondering what happened to the man who lives in the corner house.

Or you call the doctor. With a little bit of luck, as the dustman sang in the musical comedy, he is in and will see you at 2 pm. All is well. But how probable is that outcome? You now do not have much to lose, actually. You either stay sick, maybe die. Or you put up with the ER. Or you chance it and call the doctor. Good thinking. The last time this happened to me I did just that. The nurse answered and told me that the doctor was out of town but “with your symptoms”, she said you have to go to the ER immediately. “I will call them ahead so they know you are coming”, she added. Stuck! There was no way out.

“As I lay dying”, to steal a headline from Faulkner; well, just “waiting” of course, I met my nurse, her assistant nurse, and the nurse of the day. There was no nurse of the night. They connected me to many wires, poked me, and squeezed me, and then covered me with a warm blanket and left me. I then had several hours of leisure to observe the goings-on in the ER corridors. Eventually the doctor of the day came to see me, examined me, and assured me that I would live. He prescribed something to take twice a day for five days and then released me. In the ER this means two more hours of waiting because it requires paperwork, many pages of it, and signatures. It was getting dark already when the word came that I was free to get up and go home. “Go home and rest”, they advised. They did not know that one cannot rest much when one has four hungry howling dogs at home waiting for their dinner. “And drink lots of fluids!” As if there is anything else I could drink. “And call your regular doctor tomorrow.”

“Here we go again” is all I could say to that.

©  2018 by Herbert H. Hoffman    Picture credit: Royaltyfree Clipart