For Your Thoughts: American Healthcare
Never quite dismissive, never quite attentive: it’s a purgatory of white gowns and white walls.
A Note from Ellie: For Your Thoughts is an anthology of miniature essays as part of “An Ellie For Your Thoughts” and represents Ellie’s attempts in incorporating a more literary and narrative style to her writing. Each piece is dedicated to whimsically raw musings on her natural environment and the world at large.
Hour One.
The deadness of the room is stifling. There’s an obvious sluggishness to the dozen or so half-asleep (dare I say half-dead?) denizens littering the place that feels so out of touch with the notion of “emergency.” EMERGENCY ROOM, the entryway leading into it reads, and I genuinely cannot reconcile the pressure-cooker affairs of a Grey’s Anatomy episode with whatever the hell is going on right now here at Mount Auburn.
Each time I make a visit to a hospital, I am austerely reminded, no niceties spared, that our glorious nation’s top-of-the-line medical system is in complete and utter shambles.
It’s just good old American healthcare.
(As I write this piece, I make a quick Google search for “american healthcare wiki" and come across “Healthcare in the United States - Wikipedia.” The snippet of the article that the search engine happily hands over to me reads, “The U.S. is the only developed country without a system of universal healthcare, and a significant proportion of its population lacks health insurance.” You know when your dog runs up to you amidst a game of fetch and it’s clutching the desecrated corpse of a squirrel?)
I look up for half a second to regard the one moving thing in front of me. “I’m 27 weeks pregnant,” a woman says to the attendant at the registration desk. “Do I have to go to Labor and Delivery?” (It’s the name of a department at Mount Auburn.)
She says it with an interesting insipidness, as if this was just another day in the life for her, making her way to the emergency room on a Thursday night. Perhaps it is, given the sordid state of the American healthcare system. Folks must be in and out of here for conditions that are never treated like it’s their weekly grocery runs.
(I wonder if the ER has “regulars” that the staffers know by name. I hope they don’t. But maybe that would be a losing bet.)
Hives, chills, pain—pain all over, she explains to the clerk. And yet, to someone who doesn’t know a lick of English, her tone would indicate that she might as well have just been at the DMV for a dreadfully dull affair never to be thought about again. Not that she, a woman well into her third trimester of pregnancy, is experiencing enough pain to warrant a trip to the emergency room. She sits down on a sofa-chair somewhere in the waiting area, and I learn nothing more of her as she blends into the neighboring cast of characters.
The fingernail-clacking of my screen keyboard as I type–type–type myself out of spiralling boredom somehow competes with—hell, outmatches—the near-dead soundscape of the emergency room. Its competition: the mind-numbing humming of what I think is an electrical closet right next to me, a murmuring chatter between two folks that I don’t care enough to eavesdrop on, and the occasional cough.
“It’s a four-hour wait,” the attendant says.
Absolutely not. We google and call around in search of some other nearby hospital’s emergency room that might have less of a wait, like we’re combing the city for a medium-end restaurant to pop into or a dingy motel with an open room.
We leave within the hour, and I am relieved. We walk out as a man named Christopher with a cane and a limp is brought to the back room. “My name is Georgia—I’m one of the nurses”, an attendant says as she motions Christopher into the room lazily and with no kind of insistence whatsoever.
We had taken a Lyft to get to Mount Auburn, and we hop on another one to try our luck with some other place’s urgent care. Apparently you can schedule an appointment with urgent care for whatever “urgent” ailment you might or might not have.
I joke about how ambulances are really just rideshares for the rich. But it’s more a statement of fact, really. (My freshman year, I broke a bone when I dropped a newly-crufted cabinet on myself. I hopped on a Lyft to urgent care because I couldn’t afford an ambulance. It was a three hour wait, and I rushed back home at 2 a.m. to try and get enough sleep for work the next day.)
“F**king hell,” I whisper under my breath, cold and weary.
“At least we’re not taking the bus, I guess.” Though I think that would be a whole other level of absurd that the universe might blink me out of existence at even the thought of it.
Anyways, into the car we get. It’s playing “Work From Home” by Fifth Harmony. Real Grey’s Anatomy-type music, isn’t it?
The pine-tree air freshener and the necklace with a cross on it shake against the motion of the car. Five minutes in: shit—there’s a line of cars in traffic in front of us, lined up farther than I can see. I wonder absent-mindedly, if I raise my hands to the air, that I might part the traffic like it’s the Yam Suph. I do it, and I look at the necklace with a cross on it. Nothing happens.
After what feels like the length of a whole month-and-a-half-long trip to Mount Sinai, I see the sign I’d been hoping for. Not from God—God, no.
It reads: TUFTS MEDICAL. LAWRENCE MEMORIAL HOSPITAL.
Hour Two.
Tufts Med takes itself much less seriously than Mount Auburn does: it honestly feels like daycare with the overabundance of Halloween-type stickers plastering the lobby. We enter a little booth for registration, and the customary tribute of insurance info is done before we get to talk to an actual doctor-adjacent individual.
“Who would you like for your emergency contact?”
“Uh—Ellie Montemayor.”
I stick a thumb up and go back to my Gen-Z cell phone machinations.
We sign some forms that we never actually get to read with a crappy digital pen and find ourselves in the tiny waiting area of the urgent care moments later. A blow-up of the Wicked Witch of the West, or perhaps some Walmart-brand knock-off of her, makes the kind of menacing presence that only a figure smaller than a toddler could.
A broadcaster on Channel 7 says that some project or other could take eight years to complete. It might be finished, delays and all, before we finally get the hell out of here. A couple of characters exit the sticker-studded door to the urgent care that we wait to get into. One group had gotten too high and puked.
I fall asleep for a second and, the next thing we know, we’re ushered into the ward. We’re brought in alongside a blond girl named Greta; we go into Bay 1, and she goes into Bay 2 next to us.
With nothing else to do, I eavesdrop on our neighbor to hear about what got Greta into this mess. I hear a little something about working with elementary school kids, something about feeling sick, but not much else.
I zone out for a bit, staring at a metal contraption that hangs from the ceiling. It looks like some sort of weathervane.
“You did good, considering I gagged ya,” I hear the nurse say to Greta in some kind of indistinct New England accent. Huh. And then something about, “with all of the things we nurses do to people.” Do I want to find out?
A few minutes later, I hear more commotion in Bay 2. Oh—Greta is still here, and I find out she has hives as the attending physician’s assistant checks on her. Ouch.
“She might have pneumonia,” the assistant says, and recommends a chest x-ray.” I might skip the x-ray for today,” Greta replies.
It could be nothing. It could also be bleeding in the lungs. I wonder why whatever Greta might or might not have isn’t being treated with more concern. Whatever the case, she leaves, nothing more done to alleviate her condition after a good two hours of undeserved patience.
Perhaps, in another life, we could have struck up conversation, though we were worlds apart and forever separated by the curtain that splits the space we both occupied. Perhaps we could have been friends, brought together by the type of bond that fate alone has the power to weave. But she leaves before I get the chance to—before I even think to—and whatever bifurcating story may have come of our chance encounter is erased, never to be thought about again.
Bare seconds after I finish mourning the loss of my would-be friend, in this special layer of hell reserved only for those sinners that deserve the worst torture of numbing boredom, I am told that we have to wait longer for the radiologist to look at the X-ray scan. I just turn up the white noise that’s playing on loop in my brain.
I don’t even know how much more time passes before we’re finally allowed to leave.
It’s an ice pack, well wishes, and more paperwork that serve as our parting gifts. Paltry offerings, but I suppose we’ll take what we can get.
Some weeks later, we get the bill. It’s $696 (and eight cents). Good thing we have insurance. Unlike a lot of other people in our glorious nation.
It’s just good old American healthcare.