But the professionalism of health-care workers deserves to be noted and thanked sometimes, which, it seems to me, is too often not the case
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Of that moment, I remember my son rushing toward me — his arms outstretched, his eyes open in alarm — and his shout of: “Dad, look out!”
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Something heavy hit me hard on the crown of my head. I fell forward onto the pavement and swore loudly. It hurt like hell.
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We were playing basketball on a friend’s driveway. The large steel tube that held up the backboard had come loose from its cement footing, and the tube and the backboard came down and hit me. I said I was OK, that I just wanted to go home, but there was blood on my scalp, and when my son led me into my friend’s house and sat me down on a couch I started shivering.
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An ambulance arrived. The paramedic did a few quick cognitive tests. Asked my age. Asked how many fingers he was holding up. Asked what year it was — which I had to think about for a second, in the same way I misdate my cheques for the first couple of weeks in a new year. Asked if anything felt broken.
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“Just an overinflated ego.”
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At the hospital, the paramedics sat me in a chair in the emergency department’s hallway. It was chilly — the constantly opening doors to the ER let in frigid winter air — and night was coming on. The ER’s admissions lounge overflowed with patients, while inside the ER, where I sat, the department fluctuated between periods of eerie calm and sudden eruptive activity. Nurses marched about, their faces set with the resigned look that comes from constant overwork, while doctors made rare appearances then vanished. Every half-hour or so, a cleaner morosely swept the floors, and everything — the hallways, the nursing stations, the waiting patients — was bathed in the too-bright, ghastly institutional glare of fluorescent lighting.
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I waited. One hour. Two hours. The time, unmoored from any urgency, drifted by. My hopes rose when a nurse came by and asked if my name was McMartin, and I said yes, believing I was about to be treated, then she said, good, she was just checking to make sure I hadn’t gone home — which made me laugh. Then she left.
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Some time later, a doctor appeared. He examined me. More cognitive tests. Looked at my scalp. Ordered a CT scan. I was taken to the radiology department and had the scan. I was told I would get the results in two or three hours, depending. Depending on what? Depending how busy the doctor examining the scan was. Then it was back to the hallway, to sit through that fraught interlude before diagnosis when one wonders how the coin toss will go.
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More waiting. The doctor reappeared. He said the scan showed no signs of fracture or internal bleeding, but had shown — surprise! — a very small lacunar infarction in my brain, evidence of a silent stroke that had happened sometime in the last few years.
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News to me, I said.
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Well, he said, they were common in persons my age, but if I preferred to live to a ripe old age I should cut out salt, and exercise as if my life depended on it, because it very well might. Then I had my scalp cleaned, and was given a tetanus shot. Then I left. The ER’s admission lounge was still crowded.
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Of that night, it deserves observing that absolutely nothing out of the ordinary happened. The ER was slammed, but then emergency rooms around the province are regularly slammed, if they are open at all.
