emergency room epiphany
Spent Friday night at the emergency room, Saturday was my boyfriend's birthday, and at midnight we celebrated him in the hospital. The first responders appeared like angels. The oldest one felt like the father I never had, holding my hand for half an hour like my father never did, and half an hour felt like twenty eight years. In excruciating pain but completely safe, I could not tell the difference. He looked at me with professional but genuine compassion and a smile, before leaving to rescue someone else from another embarrassing and avoidable accident.
Inside the ambulance truck, it is bright as day. The siren sounds the same as it does from the street. I imagine the cars around us and the people inside them, driving home from work or wherever, looking forward to their destination but first, they have to wait a bit, make space and let us through because I spilled boiling water on myself. I must have spent four hours waiting in a bed on wheels, the kind with metal bars around so you cannot fall but also cannot leave, which I considered doing each time desperation came knocking and no doctor answered. After the burn, I fell on my knee and now I can’t walk so even with a solid exit plan, there really is nowhere to go. Bladder full, mind racing, battery emptying, I wait. It's all I can do. Mom texts me a psalm, so I read it all.
In the ob-gyn and births unit, they are bringing a newborn in the CPR room, they close the door and all I hear is the baby cry, and I wonder if this fresh human is going to die, I wonder when someone will come get me, when I finally get to pee. Minutes later, they bring the baby out, he's no longer crying, eyes are wide open, pulse is going. On the wall next to me there is a poster saying “we're here to help you”, and I ask myself who is “we”, and what is we doing and where.
But I know someone is coming for me eventually. Could be the reaper, he'll come and take me so it no longer burns nor stings. I watch too many movies, I love dramas the most and sometimes I like to pretend I'm in one, but tonight I’m not dying on the well-lit set of an indie film. I'm just in a public hospital full of doctors, someone is coming for me. The automatic doors open, and it's not a doctor, it's my boyfriend, he found me with the gps on my phone, he has no right to be here at all, but he walks in anyway. He brought me kisses and smiles and water but I have to pee, so I only drink a tiny sip and cry but I take all the kisses.
Midnight thirty and it’s slowly dawning on me that my emergency is no one's but mine, we all have one here, it's not the same but it binds us somehow. I am weirdly comforted by the thought I am not that important, no more than anyone else anyway, certainly unique but not special, and that's a good thing, that's a great thing, it alleviates much pressure and even some physical pain. It means I'm actually free and it’s all I want. A man wearing a yellow polyester shirt silently rolls me somewhere, we cross a hallway, another, and another, I kind of enjoy the ride. The final hallway is a dark tunnel with bright light in the end, it looks like death and also like birth. In this new hallway, there is a bathroom and an epiphany, I welcome both and somehow I get to be born again.
