An American Emergency Room

I spent 9 hours in an American Emergency Room with my mom.  From seven yesterday evening until four this morning.  First in Crossville and then transferring to UT Medical Center in Knoxville.  Emergency rooms are where the most pitiful, the neediest, and those who are on their last leg come to be assured of care.  They are madhouses of those suffering violence, catastrophe, sudden illness, injury, and hopelessness.  They have criminals, sinners, saints, and most are weary and heavy ladened.  Some are dying, some have nowhere else to turn, and most are hurting and need help.  The nurses, staff, orderlies, interns, assistants, and doctors or in a vague stupor of denial.  Seeing, healing, working, often laughing but all have a certain level of forced unconsciousness, vitally aware but necessarily aloof.  They speak in confident uncertainties, vague promises, hopeful unknowing, and wise textbook guesses.  And above all else, time is meaningless.  Lab coats come and go, pushing wheeled abstractions, bags of elixirs, poles, machines, displays, magic carpets, beeps, buzzes, jingles, screeches, and alarms.  On occasion, some human being will yell, scream and in terror wail out, echoing down the halls and immediately you are drawn back to the truest truth, you are in an American Emergency Room.  

Mom and me.