Angels in the ER (3 page)

Within a few minutes, her stretcher was heading down the hall toward Radiology.

I stood at the nurses’ station, writing on the charts of these two patients. A busy evening was turning into a busy night.

Suddenly, an unfamiliar voice bellowed behind me, almost in my ear.

“Where’s my baby? Where she be?”

Startled, I turned around and found myself nose-to-nose with a middle-aged woman. She was dressed in a blue-and-white-striped bathrobe, barely held closed with two large safety pins. A black silk nightgown could be seen extending below the bottom edge of the robe, almost sweeping the floor. And on her feet she wore bright-red bedroom slippers, fashioned after some fuzzy, unidentifiable animal.

But my eyes were drawn to her head. Her hair was in curlers, huge pink ones, held in place by something I couldn’t quite make out. I looked a little closer, and I recognized it—it was a large pair of women’s panties.

“Where is Naomi?” she asked no one in particular. “Her friend-girl said she was over here!”

She began to look around the department, searching frantically for her daughter. She stepped toward one of the exam rooms and was about to pull the curtain aside when I was able to stop her.

“Ma’am, I’m Dr. Lesslie. Come with me, and we’ll help you find your daughter.”

She stopped and looked at me, about to speak. Then she turned her head slightly to one side and looked over my shoulder. Her eyes widened hugely.

“My baby!” she screamed, pointing down the hallway. “What have you done to my baby?”

She swept me aside with one large arm and ran down the hall, bumping me into the counter.

“My baby! What have you done to her?” she screamed.

Our young stroke victim was returning from CT. She lay flat on the stretcher, still unresponsive, and was being rolled up the hall to her room.

“Look at her! You killed her!” She was screaming even louder now. She barreled through the radiology techs, brushing one aside as she grabbed the girl’s face in her hands.

“She dead! You killed her!”

There was an instant of silence. Her eyes rolled back in her head, and her face turned to heaven.

And then a piercing wail, “Do Jesus! Help me, Lawd!”

Jeff was moving toward the woman. He would try to calm her and then lead her to a private room. This type of outburst was not unusual in the department, and though disconcerting, we had all grown accustomed to it. But this was all new to our other patients, and a few inquisitive heads peered from behind curtains, trying to get a glimpse of the scene. They didn’t want to get too close, though. This woman was on fire.

“Who did this? Who killed my baby?”

Jeff walked to her side and quietly said, “Ma’am, she’s not dead. We’re taking good care of her.” He patted her gently on her shoulder.

She would have none of this and jerked away from his hand.

“I want to know who did this!” Her voice was becoming menacing. Then she looked directly at me and took a step in my direction. She pointed a threatening finger at me and said, “I’m gonna sue you! I’m gonna own this hospital! And you’re gonna be sorry.” There followed some choice descriptives of my heritage, and then she turned again to the young woman, patting her on the forehead. Once more she lovingly took the girl’s head in her hands.

“Baby, what they done to you? What they done to you? I’m gonna—”

She stopped in mid-sentence and froze where she stood. Then her head tilted from side to side as she studied the face of the girl lying before her. A puzzled look began to spread across her face, and her eyes began to widen in surprise. Suddenly, she was distracted by a movement further up the hallway and looked up. It was our ankle-injury patient. She was returning to the ER in a wheelchair, her X-rays in her lap.

Our distraught mother stood straight up, dropping the young woman’s head back on the stretcher.

“
There
’
s
my baby!” She ran up the hallway, smiling in relief, her
arms extended before her. The safety pins that had been barely holding her bathrobe together had finally given up and the robe flew open, flapping wildly at her sides as she ran. When she got to the wheelchair, she knelt and embraced her daughter. She hugged her tightly, rocking her back and forth.

“You all right, honey baby? You okay?”

There was nothing to say or do. We just stood there.

It was 4:30 a.m., and I was beginning to flag a little. One more cup of coffee and I might live to see the sunrise.

I was turning to walk towards the lounge when I saw Sam Wright coming up the hallway. He still wore his surgical cap and scrubs. They were soaked with perspiration, and I noticed splashes of blood from his knees down to his shoe covers.

He collapsed into one of the chairs behind the nurses’ station, pulled off his scrub cap, and tossed it into a nearby trashcan.

“Man, that was tough,” he said, shaking his head.

I walked over and sat down beside him. He was talking about Jimmie. “What did you find, Sam?” I asked.

“We got him to the OR and onto the table. As soon as we put him to sleep, his pressure started to fall. Not much at first, but then it really crashed. When I opened him up, there was blood everywhere. I tried to cross-clamp the aorta to even begin to see what was going on. The bleeding was coming from a place I couldn’t get to, and I never got complete control of it.”

He paused and looked up at me, shaking his head.

Then he continued. “That bullet nicked the side of the aorta and then lodged just below the kidney. It didn’t hit anything else. Amazing. The nick must have immediately clotted off, and he didn’t do much bleeding. Not until he got to the OR. The clot came off, and everthing broke loose. Eight units of blood. As fast as we got the blood into him, it was on the floor. We tried everything. We worked…” he paused, looking at his wristwatch. “We worked on him for three-and-a-half hours.”

He stopped, and his shoulders slumped forward. He stared unseeing at the floor.

“This is a tough one, Robert. I don’t know what else I could have done.”

We sat there, silent. Jeff came up the hall with two cups of black coffee and set the steaming Styrofoam cups on the counter. Neither of us moved.

“And you were right.” Sam spoke again. “It was a small-caliber bullet—.22, I think.”

The ER and Rock Hill and the rest of the world moved on around us. And I thought of the last words Jimmie had spoken to me.

The ER. It all happens here. This is an amazing place to observe and study the human condition. We see and experience every feeling and emotion, and do so in an intense and highly charged environment. Gone are the trappings of proper decorum and behavior. Gone are the concerns about what others may be thinking about us. Where else would you see a fifty-year-old banker walking down the hallway in a hospital gown, uncaring that his derriere was exposed to a bunch of strangers?

But we are all undressed in the ER, all of us. Our strengths and weaknesses are openly and sometimes uncomfortably exposed. This is true for patients and physicians alike. As caregivers, whether nurse or doctor, orderly or secretary, we quickly learn the limits of our willingness and ability to empathize, to sacrifice, and to step outside of ourselves. It is possible to remain aloof, distant, and shielded…but it comes with a price.

Ultimately, the ER is a place where the faith of each one of us will be tested. Our beliefs will be tempered and refined, or exposed and discarded as worthless. Here we can learn who we are and on what ground we stand. And sometimes, it is a place where our faith can be found.

These pages tell the stories of people who have traveled into this dark valley. Through their experiences and struggles, we can search our own hearts for answers to finding grace and peace in the darkness.

 2 

The
Least
of
These

I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and
you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited
me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you
looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.

—M
ATTHEW
25:35-36

T
he ER is a lot of things to a lot of people, but one of its most important functions is to serve as a safety net for those who have nowhere else to go. These are the people with no money, no insurance, no family, no friends. The ER offers the best and last chance they have for medical care. Sometimes it’s the only place they have for care of any kind.

It may be difficult to imagine someone would consider the ER a place for comfort and companionship, but a good example of this occurs every Christmas. Most people would want to be at home, or with family and friends, you’d think, and a trip to the ER would be an unpleasant necessity only because of dire illness or injury. But that’s not the case for a large and largely invisible part of our society. Mid to late morning will see a steadily growing stream of people who should be elsewhere.

They have no one else to spend Christmas Day with than whatever staff happens to have the misfortune of being on duty in the department. They have no other place to find a holiday meal, bland and unexciting though it may be. And when you take that closer look, and you try to imagine what life must be like for this man or woman, and
especially what word you should speak or action you should take, it can get pretty uncomfortable.