The Stars and the Cookie Jar

Well, I still hate hospitals. But now I am comfortably in bed in our apartment, surrounded by the purring soul sounds of Bungee* and Grog**, and not really considering going back to New England until Thursday sometime. I have a note from the doctor.

Boss is lukewarm but that's understandable, especially considering an envelope containing keys and codes for my new store has apparently already arrived in New England for me. Oh, timing, I love my life's timing.

We sat in the ER for around five and a half hours last night, and I'm sure I freaked out all over darthrami slightly more than was necessary; I was in a haze of ick, and berating myself heartily for leaving my purse with debit card and insurance card all the way up in New England. No, I don't know why natural selection hasn't eaten me.

But I was just, I was struck by how unfair the present system of triage is. There was an elderly couple from Cote d'Ivoire who sat in the waiting room for eternity and a half -- they arrived before we did and left only very shortly before us -- and a family of Latin American women all there for the sake of one sick toddler, and a woman who had to wear capris and sandals because the lymphedema in her leg was so bad, who tried, while my fiancee was scavenging from the vending machines, to ask me a question in Spanish. And it's like, if you speak English and you know the key, correct words to put down on that one line on the triage slip, you may be scared and you may wait, but you'll get through the queue and you'll get accurate help. That's not fair. This is a huge metropolitan area, piggyback on the nation's capitol. There ought to be Spanish and Filipino and Ghanaian interpreters all the time, to serve all these segments of the population who just want to know how the doctor is going to make the pain stop, or who's looking after their son, and what exactly is happening to the toddler being catheterised and intubated. (I don't know the words for catheterised or intubated off the top of my head in the non-English tongues I do speak.)

Meh. I wish I had some brilliant idea to implement change, but in this instance, all I want to do is sip some more water and sleep. Right now I am an apathy farm. It's like an ant farm, but not busy.

Oh, and I was, along the way, nasally violated.

Hugs for friede. [Er. Unrelated to that last bit.]



*names have been changed to protect the maleficent.
**and the innocent.