Philip Allen Green - People of the ER

People of the ER

People of the ER

______

Philip Allen Green MD

2017 Philip Allen Green MD

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 154822295X

ISBN 13: 9781548222956

For my family

These stories are fiction. They are based on real experiences I have had working as a physician, but the characters, the specifics, even a few of the medical practices in the story are fiction, intentionally chosen for their narrative power. Any resemblance to people, living or dead, real or otherwise, is coincidental and unintentional.

No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the author.

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Contents

The People of the ER

Let me tell you about the other people of the emergency department, the people who live in the space between the notes.

The people of the ER.

They are the addicts at the end of addiction. They are the lost who have run out of things to lose. They are the drunks, the druggies, the haters, the handcuffed, and the ultimate have-nots.

In any given instant, in any given ER, if you just look hard enough, you can find them. They are scattered throughout the rooms, half hidden in the noise and chaos, tucked away here and there between the chest pains and traumas. It is easy to miss them, to walk right past them or even right through them. But not today.

Lets start with room one.

It has a man in it. His name is Steven. He is an alcoholic. Not the Hi, my name is Steven, and Im an alcoholic kind of alcoholicno, Steven is the ER kind of alcoholic. Youve probably caught a glimpse of him before. At the very least youve seen your towns version, your towns Steven.

He is one of the ones whove been wadded up and tossed away by the worlda forgotten scrap of humanity, a scavenger who scurries away into the darkness when you flip on the security lights at 3:00 a.m. You can find himyou can find them curled up on park benches and sprawled spread-eagled across the littered grass of nearly every downtown median. They are not the ones with the clever, handwritten signs asking for money. The true Stevens are too drunk to care. As you drive by, you tell your kids, Those people are just sleeping, but you know the truth. They are beyond blackout drunk at 7:43 a.m.

The Stevens are everywhere.

In some ways, the Stevens are the true citizens of the world. Politics and borders are meaningless to them. They live and have lived in every country and every time since the dawn of history. They are their own tribe and their own people, the true nomads who wander and drift with the wind. In the winter they migrate south. When summer comes, they stumble their way back, bottle by bottle, to small towns and big cities the world over.

If you need to talk to Steven, or maybe just want to bring him a sandwich, follow the broken glass. It is a trail of a thousand shards shining in the sun. A trail of tragedy. Get down close on your hands and knees and take a deep breath. You will smell last nights booze. Your eyes will water, and your nose will burn as if you have just snorted a long line of industrial bleach.

Move your head ever so slightly, and the trail glistens. It lights up like a path of diamond dust. The clear glass of broken vodka bottles catches the rising sun just so. Lean even closer, and you will find beautiful reds, blues, and greens. They are the colors of smashed-up Mad Dog 20/20. Bottles dropped and broken, still dripping with fortified wine. They speckle the trail like paint whipped from a brush. Throw in a few gold flecks spilled from the shoplifted fifth of Goldschlger, and suddenly your trail of tragedy looks so damn beautiful that even you cant resist it. You have to follow it, to find its artist, to find its source.

So off you go, strolling along, following the trail like a dog on a scent. It leaves the ER and wobbles across the parking lot in front of the hospital. It jaywalks across Main Street, nearly getting hit by the 8:40 a.m. bus. It takes a sharp left into the alley and sneaks over to the dumpster behind KFC, keeping an eye out for the pimply faced manager with the bad temper. Lifting the lid, it jumps in, chows down with a quick breakfast of cold chicken and hard mashed potatoes, and moves on.

A stop by the liquor store to resupply, paid for by collected bottles and cans, and then its a beeline for the river. The trail hops the broken chain-link fence, half slides, half tumbles down the muddy bank, and just like that, its home. Time to celebrate with a drink. The trail throws some wood on last nights smoldering fire and gets it blazing just as other trails return from their journeys, their scavenging, and their adventures. The ticket to admission is booze, and each new trail brings it aplenty in bags and backpacks and bottles.

You may look at the camp and see nothing but a messfilthy blankets, a couple of used needles, an inverted shopping cart with three wheels. What you dont know is that those are all landing lights. They are signals to the other drunks and other druggies still soaring high. When the time comes and the wings fall off their heroin high or fortified wine blitz, the lights of the broken bottles will beckon. Crash-land here with us, they call. Crash-land here with us.

Should you be so inclined, you could climb over the guard rail and down the embankment. You could stomp into one of their makeshift camps and start kicking bottlesshattering glass, kicking ass, howling at the top of your lungs. But all you would get from the Stevens would be blank stares, confused swigs of boxed wine, and eyes as empty as the bottles scattered at their feet.

Yes, the alcoholics are ER people. People between the notes.

But they are not the only ones.

In room five theres Mandy B. She is an addicta Benadryl addict. Yep, you heard me right: Benadryl. Two or three times a week, she consumes industrial-size boxes filled with the pink pills of antihistamine. Popping them like candy, she departs this world for her space between the notes. Inevitably, someone sees her wandering about the Walmart parking lot, walking in front of cars, picking at power line poles, talking to people only she can see. The police are called, the medics are called, and then like the prodigal daughter, she is brought back to her people.

The people of the ER.

She stumbles about the emergency department, her muscles herky-jerky like a turkey that is half decapitated and staggering about the barnyard the day before Thanksgiving. She tries to walk. Her every movement is astop-start, stop-start, stop-start, stop! Her lips purse and words slur, her giant pupils dilated like two black moons stamped into a beet-red face. She swats at spiders and snakes and creepy crawlies that only she can see as they skitter and scatter and melt back into the walls, into her skin.

Go back into your room! I shout as she stumbles out into the ER for the fifteenth time in fifteen minutes, blabbing about some bat or cat or hat that she saw spiraling out of her hand.

Yes, Mandy B. is definitely one of the ER people.

Dont get me wrong. There are other people here, too. What you might call normal people. People like you. In room eleven, a businesswoman named Shelby with the flu. In room six, a four-year-old girl named Tami with an earache. In room nine, a seventy-year-old man whose name I cant remember right now. He has pneumonia.

When these people look out at the world, they only see others like themselves. The ER people are invisible to them. If they do see them, they are a brief curiosity at most. An afterthought, like the dog with three legs that gimps past your house on a Tuesday afternoon. You watch it pass by and then forget about it.

But I dont. I cant. Not when I keep seeing them.

Anthony, for example. Hes in room eight. Anthony is a coke fiend. And not the soda kind. I see him every other Monday of the month. The Monday that follows the weekend after his paycheck. The paycheck he spends on cocaine and prostitutes.