I went to the emergency room at Roosevelt Hospital in New York yesterday to ask about a replacement part for my CPAC devise that helps me sleep better and not snore.

As I was a visitor I had to go to the emergency room. I had to wait in a curtained off area. On either side of me were two woman. On the left side was an elderly woman with a German accent.

I saw her as she was being wheeled by with a black eye and contusions on her face. I heard her coming from down the corridor. She was shouting at the Indian nurse pushing her. She had been left somewhere for an hour. Besides verbally abusing the nurse she was screaming she wanted to go home. She was brought there by her son. After listening to her for 15 minutes it was no wonder her son dropped her off and left. At one point she called the nurse a Nazi.

She tried to walk out but security caught her and brought her back. The doctor came in to talk with her. She stated by telling the doctor to immediately fire the Indian nurse. She went on about she was an American with rights and they couldn’t force her to stay there.

The doctor told the nurses to admit her and left.

The nurses were incredibly patient with her. She did want to stay, she would change her closes. The staff did a great job of coaxing out of her clothes and out of there. While all the time she is shouting, “I’m an American! I have My right!”

She had fallen and then were concerned that she had broken her hip.

Behind curtain number 2 was the following dialogs. “I need to take a blood sample Mrs Jones.”

“But I already gave a urine sample.”

“Yes, you have but now the doctor needs a blood sample.”

“Use the urine sample!”

“We have to do different tests, so I need some of your blood.”

“I don’t care. You’re not getting any. Use the urine sample!”

She gave the same response to every request from the nurse. That dialogs got a little tedious and I tuned out. As I left there was a blood curding scream from behind the curtain.

Again, the staff were so patient.

While all this was going on, a smiling, bubbly young doctor was talking to me like an old friend meeting over a cup of coffee. She was doing her residency there. How do they do it?

A month earlier I visited the Northampton Hospital in the UK. I was in the A&E as they call it, (Accident and Emergency). I had a slight pain that I wanted looked into as I was about to leave on a long drive around Scotland.

I arrived at six and left at midnight. Here, there were no curtained off areas. Everyone, who wasn’t bleeding were sitting in plastic chairs in front of a large magnetic board with movable signs with our names on them. It was mush like an airport control tower.

With each new arrival the little signs would get moved around and they would up date how long we had been in the holding pattern.

Next to me was a very elderly woman in a wheel chair. She was hearing challenged, so when she spoke it was extremely load. She was also not happy. I remembered her because for no apparent reason she would regularly yell out, “Bollocks!” and half those waiting would leap up startled and the rest snickered. “How unlady like.”

After her she was wheeled down the hall, two police came in asking the nurses if they had seen a man with an injured man with a Russian accent. They seem to have misplaced him. They were so proper and nonpluses. It was at this point the doctors invited me to spend the night for observation. The combination of the missing injured Russian and Miss Bollocks somewhere down the hall, I declined their kind invitation and agreed to return in the morning.

The next morning they were very prompt at seeing me. Five doctors were making the rounds with three nurses. I had to take a bed so they could see me as they were making their rounds. So I chatted briefly with a guy in the adjacent bed, mostly about the food, which I had declined. His first question made me think he may have spent some time in another institution. “What are you in for?”

I was released after my examination by the group with a grocery bag of medication (all free!) . There were two Pakistani doctors. I could not understand a word of the one asking all the questions. The other Pakistani doctor had to repeat everything the first one would say for me. I gave a “huh?” look at the clarifier and he just shrugged his shoulders and rolled his eyes.

Emergency rooms have got to be the one of the weirdest spaces on the planet.

Popularity: 38%