Emergency Room Read Free Page B

Seth.)
    “I’ll do the first one with you,” said an insurance clerk, popping out of her cubicle. She was barely five feet tall, slender, blonde, middle-aged. “I’m Mary. It seems a little zoo-y, doesn’t it? That’s because it is. It’s Monday. Mondays are zoos.”
    In spite of the fact that everybody including children in the Waiting Room was bigger than Mary, Mary strode through the place as if it were empty. Diana felt brave enough to inspect the room. She actually focused her eyes. Yes. Everybody there qualified for zoo status. In fact, she would have felt a lot better about one man in the corner if he were in a cage.
    “ 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