The emergency room was so busy in the late afternoon that the queue just to check in moved at a snail’s pace. It seemed as if all of New York were there. The man behind Lynn Anne was drunk, dressed in rags, and reeking of old urine and wine. Each time the line would move forward, he would stumble into Lynn Anne, grabbing at her to keep from falling. In front of Lynn Anne was a huge woman, carrying a child completely swathed in a dirty blanket. The woman and child were silent, waiting their turn.
Large doors sprang open to Lynn Anne’s left, and the check-in line had to give way to a swarm of gurneys carrying the results of an auto accident that had occurred just minutes earlier. The injured and dead were whisked past the waiting area and taken directly into the emergency room proper. Those waiting to be seen knew it was going to take that much longer to be called. In one corner a Puerto Rican family was sitting around a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket having dinner. They seemed unconcerned with what was happening in the emergency room and hadn’t even noticed the arrival of the auto-accident victims.
Finally only the huge woman with the baby was ahead of Lynn Anne. Hearing the woman speak it was apparent she was foreign. She told the clerk that “the baby she no cry no more.” The clerk told her that usually the complaint was the opposite, which the woman didn’t understand. The clerk asked to see the baby. The woman pulled back the edges of the blanket, revealing a baby the color of the sky before a summer storm, a dark blue-gray. The baby had been dead so long it was stiff like a board.
Lynn Anne was so shocked that when it was her turn she couldn’t speak. The clerk sympathized with her and told her that they have to be prepared to see anything and everything. Pushing her auburn hair from her forehead, Lynn Anne found her voice and gave her name, student I.D. number, and her complaint. The clerk told her to have a seat and that it would be a wait. He assured her they’d see her as soon as possible.
After waiting nearly two more hours, Lynn Anne Lucas was led down a busy hall and placed in a cubicle separated from a larger room by stained nylon curtains. An efficient LPN took an oral temperature and her blood pressure, then left. Lynn Anne sat on the edge of an old examining table and listened to the multitude of sounds around her. Her hands were wet from anxiety. She was twenty, and a Junior, and had been entertaining the idea of going to medical school by taking the required courses. But now when she looked around, she wondered. It was not what she’d expected.
She was a healthy young woman, and her only other experience with hospital emergency rooms had been a roller-skating mishap at age eleven. Strangely enough she’d been brought to the very same emergency room, since she and her family had lived nearby before moving to Florida. But Lynn Anne had not had a bad memory of the event. She guessed that the Med Center had changed as much as its neighborhood since she’d been there as a child.
The intern who appeared a half-hour later was youthful Dr. Huggens. Being from West Palm Beach he seemed to enjoy the fact that Lynn Anne was from Coral Gables, and he made small talk about Florida while he looked at her chart. It was also obvious that he was pleased Lynn Anne was a pretty ail-American girl, something he hadn’t seen in his last one thousand patients. Later he even asked for her phone number.
“What brings you to the ER?” he said, beginning his workup.
“It’s hard to describe,” said Lynn Anne. “I get episodes of not seeing right. It started about a week ago while I was reading. All at once I began to have trouble with certain words. I could see them but I couldn’t be sure of their meaning. At the same time I would get a terrible headache. Here.” Lynn Anne put her hand on the back of her head and ran it around the side of her head to a point above her ear. “It’s a dull pain that comes and goes.”