I didn't mention it when it happened but I spent another long day in the hospital emergency room with my mother. Our previous visit there — the one I described here — was last Friday. We were back there on Saturday afternoon. She was in the hospital for two nights and then I brought her home Monday afternoon. (My thanks to those of you, including several total strangers, who've sent good wishes and messages of concern. I think she's okay now.)
I lack many skills in this world but I have one that comes in handy in these situations. It's the ability to be in peoples' way. This is not just because I'm a pretty large human being. Even back when I was svelte, I had the uncanny capacity to stand in the wrong place and to enormously inconvenience others around me. This is usually a source of embarrassment and personal shame but it helps when you're trying to get attention from scurrying doctors and nurses. In an emergency room, they wind up tending to Mom just so they can get me out of their way.
The most interesting thing I observed/eavesdropped this time was a conversation between a doctor and a patient in the next cubicle. The physician was informing the poor guy that he would need a kidney transplant. Worse, the patient did not have a potential donor in his family, nor did he have the funds or insurance to cover the cost. Still, the whole thing was discussed quite matter-of-factly. The vocal tones and rhetoric were about the same you'd hear if an auto mechanic was telling someone they needed new seat covers they couldn't afford. I found the dispassionate air quite chilling; like both parties were resigned to the fact that nothing could be done for the man. The doctor asked, "Any questions?" and when the man said he had none, the doctor hurried off to treat a lady who could be helped…who'd just been brought in with severe (but not fatal) facial wounds, courtesy of her "boy friend." I mentioned to one nurse that they seemed to get a lot of cases like that and she said, "If it wasn't for psycho boy friends, we wouldn't be in business."
A few minutes later, the guy with the faulty kidney got dressed and left. And ten minutes later, that cubicle was occupied by a very pregnant lady (like, any day now) who'd been severely beaten by the man who got her that way. Doctors were huddling just outside the door, discussing if and how they could save the baby. One gave the order, "Get the social counselor down here. I don't want to save this woman and then have to release her to go home to that guy."
So here's my latest story about the hospital cafeteria. On weekends, this one doesn't have the steam table with three hot entrees and as many side dishes. It's just the grill, meaning burgers and chicken sandwiches. I suddenly flashed on the 1962 MAD Magazine parody of the TV series, Dr. Kildare — this panel, in particular…
I don't know if you can read the tiny type on your screen but the senior doctor lectures the younger doctor by saying, "…if you never learn another thing from me, please remember this! Never…NEVER eat a hamburger in a hospital cafeteria!" At the time this issue came out, I was ten and I had an uncle dying, so we were spending a lot of time at a hospital and dining in its cafeteria. Heeding the advice of MAD, I avoided ordering a burger, even though I wasn't sure what the line meant. Was it that hamburgers in hospital cafeterias were just notoriously bad or was there something more to it than that? Maybe hospitals made their burgers out of…I don't know…leftover body parts? When you're ten, things like that occur to you. I didn't really believe that was it but I couldn't quite figure out why, as I thought was implied in the joke, the burgers at a hospital cafeteria were worse than the ones in any cafeteria. What was it about them being served in a hospital?
I outgrew such worries but until last Saturday, I don't think I'd ever had a hamburger in a hospital cafeteria. I wasn't going to have one then but they were all out of chicken and I was famished. So, well aware that I was scorning the sage counsel of MAD, I steeled myself and ordered…a hamburger in a hospital cafeteria. And after I took two bites, I suddenly realized I was right when I was ten. That thing was definitely made out of somebody's spleen.