Sunday afternoon in the ER -- now that's entertainment!

Out Of My Mind

By Liz Moody
lizmoody@berkeley.edu

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On my list of places to spend a Sunday afternoon, hospitals would probably fall somewhere below Disneyland and above the dentists office (it makes me uncomfortable when the dentist tries to make conversation while prodding my mouth with sharp devices, and I have to drool an unintelligible response at which point the dentist will pull the tools out of my mouth and say, "You need to stay still" and I'll scream — in my head, of course, as not to mess up the gauze puffing up my cheeks — "Then why are you asking me these silly questions?!").

Yet this doesn't come through in my lifestyle. I seem to find myself in hospitals more frequently than their fun-factor would provide for. I spent this past Sunday in the emergency room with a friend (not me this time, Dad, aren't you proud?) who was suffering from some sort of stomach sickness that involved a lot of vomiting and other stuff that I didn't really want her to go into quite as much detail as she did.

Emergency rooms are kind of like the snowboarding of reality — the extreme sport version of life. Emotions are at a peaking, quivering state that only heart attacks and broken toes can induce. I sat next to a woman and her elderly mother, who provided me with ample entertainment (I'm not nosy, I'm a writer!) once I'd finished all the two year old copies of People. Apparently, the daughter had ripped out her mother's heart. I say this because their conversation went something like:

Mother: "You know you ripped out my heart?"

Daughter: "You're not yourself right now. You don't know what you're saying."

Mother: "I'm not myself! Would you be yourself without a heart?"

Daughter: "Calm down, Mother, you're going to kill yourself quicker."

I listened to them as they started screaming, dissolved into tears, and then tentatively reached out to hug each other. This is when I got bored (and somewhat tempted to help them regress to their more entertaining state. "Remember when you said that she'd ripped your heart out?" I could lean over and say).

I went up to the man behind the front desk.

"Excuse me?" I said, pasting one of my signature irresistible smiles (perfected in a quest for ice cream at age 6) on my face. "Do you have any idea how much longer it's going to be?"

"I can't tell you," he said, shuffling through his paper work.

"Well, can you tell me if it's gonna be long? Like, should I go take a walk? Do I have time to go to the corner store for Skittles?"

"You could write a novel," he said. "Or cure the common cold. Maybe then some of the people in front of you wouldn't be here."

"Awesome," I said to the funny, funny man. I settled back into the plastic chairs, where I alternately scowled and contemplated health care in this country. The man behind me was complaining loudly about how he was having a heart attack and had been waiting for more than three hours.

I don't know much about heart attacks and medicine (which probably wouldn't make me a good candidate to cure the common cold) but I do know there's something fundamentally wrong with a system where ailing people are turned away, told to pay amounts they cannot afford or are trapped in a germ cesspool of a room for 10 hours, waiting for a harried five minute visit with an overworked doctor.

I don't know how this could be made better, as it seems to be problematic all over the world.

In Germany, everyone has health care (good) but this results in older people going to the doctor several times a week because, in the words of Dr. Weissman, "they're bored" (bad).

In Brazil, public health care consists of little more than a dirty room and a couple band-aids.

A loud sniffle startled me out of my thoughts and I looked to my left, where the daughter and mother had their arms around each other.

"I'm so glad you got sick so we could talk, Mom," the younger said.

"You're still not going in the will, baby," the mother whispered tenderly.

And that's the good thing about America.

We may not have figured out how to cure the sick or take care of our people, but we have the things that really matter. We have entertainment.

Liz Moody, a Johansen High School graduate, is a student at the University of California at Berkeley. She can be reached at lizmoody@berkeley.edu.