Part way through the exchange of information, the in-take nurse received a phone call. She politely, calmly excused herself and then started jogging down the hall to a set of double doors. As she goes, another nurse magically appears and jogs behind her. Then another. I don't mean that fast paced, speed walking thing you see nurses in movies doing. I mean a flat out jog.
Steve looks at me and says, "It's not good when nurses run."
We wait because there is nothing else we can do. We're all smart enough to know when nurses jog down the hall that a bigger, more stressful emergency is unfolding on the other side of those double doors. But what? I assume it's someone in cardiac arrest or someone in critical condition after a car accident.
A few minutes later, a doctor and several nurses appear, rushing a young man on a stretch into a small room. He's in his early twenties, Asian-American. Unconscious. He looks two inches from death. Except for the sweat coating the skin of his face, he looks like a body in a casket. Truly.
"Probably a heroine overdose," Steve, my trusty EMT, conjectures.
There is a flurry of activity in an effort to revive this man. Nurses coming and going in and out of the room, instructions dictated, volleyed.
The in-take nurse reappears, resuming the transfer of information about me as if nothing is happening in the small room to my right. Um? Shouldn't we be panicking right now, I'm thinking to myself.
The EMTs transfer me to a hospital bed in a small, semi-private room at the opposite end of the ER. Somewhere along the way, the staff revive the overdose man. He admits to injecting morphine, not heroine as Steve assumed. Apparently, he was a shooting up while a passenger in a car, looking for a good time, I guess. The woman driving the car recognized that the situation quickly tumbled out of control and drove straight to the ER.
All this information is relayed to the EMTs who are passing it along to me. I don't bother to ask if they should be doing that-- patient confidentiality or something.
While waiting for the in-take nurse to return, I recall seeing a woman dressed in black, her blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, her black eyeliner smudged from crying, looking fragile and scared. While the OD man was being rushed to care, she had slipped into the ER. Another doctor had instructed her to wait on the other side of the double doors, barking the instruction sternly. At the time I didn't know if she was with the OD man or looking for someone else.
Anyway, there was a man who had overdosed on morphine and the EMTs had just given me a dose of morphine not but ten / fifteen minutes earlier. I'm more than a little freaked out. Finally, I blurt out "Is that going to happen to me?"
"No, you're being monitored. That's not going to happen to you," the second EMT whose name I've forgotten, reassures me. I think he goes on to explain that overdoses occur when you shoot up in a car. My memory is a little foggy here so I'm not totally certain that's what he said.
I'm still freaked out.
Once I'm settled into the semi-private ER room, the EMTs wish me the best and take their leave. My nurse introduces herself. (I've since forgotten her name. I know. I'm terrible in that way.)
I spent the next seven hours in the ER, waiting for x-rays and throwing up my guts from the pain meds despite additional medication that's supposed to prevent nausea and vomiting. It was so bad that I actually vomited while someone was pushing me to the x-ray room.
Three x-rays later I learned that I have two simple fractures: one in the tibia bone and one in the fibula bone, down near the ankle.
In the middle of the night, a physician's assistant, along with the nurse, fitted me with a splint. That was painful although they were careful as possible about moving my ankle as little as possible.
The pain meds, whatever they were, affected my breathing, which is the real reason they couldn't release me. Every time my blood pressure dipped below 90, an alarm sounded and I would wake up. Eventually, the nurse put me on oxygen, which helped. After an hour or two, she would take the oxygen away to see if I could sustain my breathing, but I couldn't. Same thing. An alarm beep, beep, beeped. I looked at the monitor every time and the number in upper right hand corner of the screen flashed 88 or 82 or some number in between.
Repeat throughout the night. Sometimes I would wake up to see the nurse watching me. Literally. Just watching me breathe. That was unnerving, though I know she was just doing her job.
Finally, around six in the morning, my breathing stabilized. I didn't feel like my brain was in a fog anymore because some of the pain meds had worn off. The hospital was ready to discharge me.
At six thirty in the morning, the nurse removed the IV. Within moments, I threw up again, dry heaving a little because there was no food left in my system. The day nurse, whose shift started at 7 AM, gave me crackers and ginger ale, which settled my stomach.
By seven, Joseph was at the hospital, ready to take me home.
But really, this was just the beginning.
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