Fourth Observation

If you have ever been in an emergency room before, you know that before you can get treated, they take your name and then the wait begins. Sometimes patients wait for hours on end. Actually, every time I have ever been to the emergency room, whether it was for me or someone else, the wait was over an hour, minimum.
When my teammate started to get sick, we never thought it would be a trip to the E.R. I volunteered to take her because everyone else was either in class or doing their workout. I knew it would be another opportunity to observe. This time, I observed the waiting room.
When we arrived at the E.R. at around 6pm it was packed. It was the busiest waiting room I had ever seen. It was filled with pregnant women, broken bones, illness and their family members. Within the first hour, I saw people getting anxious. It was obvious they had been there a long time. Within two hours, only four of those people were called in to be treated and by that time, more had arrived. We both knew where weren’t getting out of there any time soon. By this time, one man in a wheel chair was ready to have a fit. He was mumbling and cursing under his breath and was hitting the side of the chair. He made it apparent that he wanted to be helped because he was tired of waiting. He had gotten up quite a few times to ask the nurse at the front desk how much longer it would be, and every time he asked, he got the same answer, “I don’t know sir, will you please sit down”. Finally he had had enough. He got up from his wheel chair and when he stumbled I saw why he was in a wheel chair in the first place. All his toes on his right foot had more stitches then I thought imaginable. This wasn’t your average sized man either, he was well over 6’5” and when he stood up and the nurse went to assist him he could have easily picked her up with one arm.
What we didn’t know at first is that he was a “regular”. Most of the nurses knew him on a first name basis and you could see how frustrated they were with him. He had a complete fit. When he was done flailing his arms around cursing at everyone and realized that wasn’t getting him any faster, he tripped himself and tumbled to the ground. One nurse came over so furious she called him a baby and an actor. I personally didn’t think it was very professional but I didn’t know his past history at the hospital, or his condition. She grabbed him with another nurse and placed him in the closest chair. They told him to wait there until it was his turn to be seen; it felt like he was being talked to like a second grader who misbehaved. He continued to mumble and curse them out under his breath but he calmed down.
Everyone was speechless. I’m not sure if it was his reaction, or the nurses but it was a little less loud after that. Hours began to pass quickly as we still waited and nothing was really as exciting. A homeless man tried to get a dollar off everyone in the waiting room, and he would come back after every dollar with a new food item from the vending machine in the hallway.
The nurses continued to call people in while others left because the wait was just too long. After waiting a little over six hours, we finally got shown to a room. By that time, there wasn’t many people left waiting, but some were there from before we arrived, so God only knows how long, or how much longer they were going to wait.