As I sat in an emergency room waiting room late on a Tuesday night, I reflected on the many times I had been in the ER. I had spent a lot of time in the hospital waiting room because of my mom. However, this time was different than all the times I had been because of my mother; I was there because of my friends (and it had less to do with internal organs and bones, but rather some laundry soap in their eyes). Here’s what I learned during my time in waiting rooms.
- I didn’t inherit just my mother’s genes, but also her waiting room guilt.
- I looked at the seat across from me and saw a woman loudly talking on the phone and wildly moving around the seat. My first instinct was to get angry at her. It’s almost midnight, why does she need to be talking so loudly? But then I remembered why so many of us were there: we were in pain. The way she braced herself on the couch and limped to get a blanket from the front desk made my heart sink. I wanted to give up a spot that wasn’t even mine so she could be seen.
- Never assume you’ll be out by a certain time: it will take longer than you think.
- Walking from my car to the building at 11 PM, my friend suggested we get Insomnia Cookies after as a treat. It closed at 1 am, but we thought that we would definitely be out by then. It was such a small injury, they would be able to treat it quickly, right? It quickly passed 1 am, however, and we realized that we would continue to be there for hours.
- Always bring headphones.
- No matter how late you head into the ER, it will always be loud. The TV in the waiting room may seem like great entertainment at first, but after three hours of hearing Seth Meyer’s voice, you can get pretty annoyed. Luckily, the day I was there the other people seemingly weren’t in the worst pain ever, but there will be times when a patient will be screaming or crying or moaning in pain, and you’ll want to drown that out with some sort of other noise.
- Try not to assume that you’ll be able to get any work done there.
- The environment of a hospital waiting room is not one in which to try to get work done. The fluorescents hurt your eyes, it’s always cold, and, as I said before, it’s loud. Let yourself take a break. The stress of simply being there, whether it’s yourself that’s in pain or the person you’re with, is enough in and of itself.
- You may not get the answer you want (or the correct one).
- After waiting for 4 hours in a waiting room after getting soap in their eye, my friend spent maybe 20 minutes with the doctor and simply had saline solution put in their eye and was told they had mild chemical conjunctivitis. Once when I was younger, about in fourth grade, I woke up with a terrible rash. When I say terrible, I mean terrible — my skin was scaly. So, my parents thought it was best to go to the emergency room. After sitting there for hours in pain, the doctor called me and after a short exam, came to the conclusion that I may have lupus (a chronic autoimmune disease). My mom, being the smart woman she is, thought that maybe we needed a second opinion. When my pediatrician’s office opened, she brought me in and they found that I simply just had a terrible allergic reaction to poison ivy. A second opinion is always a good choice.
I think the thing I learned most was that I love my friends, and there is no one with which I would rather sit in a hospital waiting room.
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