Without flinching, he gave me the phone he was using. I’m not even sure he said goodbye to the person he was talking to. When I thanked him, he looked surprised. He continued his intense eye contact with me and said, “Don’t thank me. We’re people. This is what we do. We help each other.” I remember thinking what he said would be very profound if it was in a movie. What a shame such a great moment was being wasted on real life.
I felt very guilty that I was using his phone and leaving him without one in an ER, so I kept thanking him over and over. Annoyed, he pulled another phone from his back pocket, held it up to show me he was good, and nonchalantly started using his other phone instead. He had two phones on him. This is the kind of moment in a writers’ room that we would call “too broad,” as in, it’s funny but too ridiculous to ever actually happen in reality.
As I studied his phone, I was convinced I must have also had some kind of damage to my brain or eyes because I couldn’t make out the characters in the little keyboard. They all looked like tiny sea monkeys. I finally realized through my trauma haze that what I was looking at were Arabic letters. I was too embarrassed to ask him to change the keyboard to English characters, so I just pretended I knew how to use it. Look, I like to think I’ve made a solid amount of progress around my codependence, but when shit hits the fan, I often revert to my primary mental conditioning. So here I was, lying to a stranger in an emergency room, with my ear hanging off my head, pretending to know one of the most complex languages in the world.
Before I could embarrass myself further, I finally got called in to see a doctor. I was rolled into a room with three other patients separated by paper curtains. A lovely male nurse put me in the bed and said, “The doctor will be right with you.” I’ve been to the ER enough times to know this phrase actually means: “You’re going to sit here for about an hour, so if you have a serious injury, you might as well just spend some time on WebMD and do the surgery on yourself with a car key and some chicken wire.”
“You’re okay, you’re okay,” I kept saying to myself. I was not okay, but delusion has always been my most reliable anesthetic. I had read that when animals get injured, their senses sharpen. Even though I was missing most of my ear, my hearing was the best it had ever been. I was surprised I could hear the doctor two curtains away talking quietly to a patient. The patient was describing his common head cold in excruciatingly boring detail. The doctor probably should have just diagnosed him with Munchausen syndrome and sent him home, but he sat there listening and saying “It’s going around.” I was so antsy to get treated that in this moment I saw the cruel irony in sick people being called “patients.”
I was feeling forgotten about and invisible, so I tried to do breathing exercises Vera had taught me. You breathe in for five seconds, hold for five seconds, breathe out for five seconds; then you repeat this again and again. This calms down the amygdala, which is the part of the brain that basically tells your body to go apeshit with panic. After about twenty minutes, I deduced that the vibe in the ER was way too mellow for my taste: The nurses moseyed around and nobody seemed to be in the slightest bit of a rush. It seemed to me like once you’ve been working in an emergency room long enough, nothing seems like an emergency. Maybe I didn’t need a doctor or a nurse; maybe I needed Shonda Rhimes to come in here and infuse everyone with the intensity of Grey’s Anatomy.
Just as the breathing exercise started working, I heard the doctor ask the male nurse about a sports person retiring from whatever sports he does. “He’s not getting traded?”
You guys, I tried very hard to be cool and wait my turn, but small talk about sports? Well, that did it.
I truly don’t remember getting out of the hospital bed, but within seconds I was giving a lecture to the entire ER. I was channeling Tony Robbins meets a JV soccer coach who lives vicariously through his players. I vividly remember saying, “The lack of leadership in here is incorrigible.” I don’t think I had ever said that word out loud in my life, and when I did, we were all pretty impressed. I followed that up with a diatribe on how poorly the ER was being run, even though I knew literally nothing about how an ER should be run. I’d be remiss if I didn’t tell you that as my speech gained momentum, I started delivering it as if I was in a rap battle, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t defaulting to an impersonation of Eminem in 8 Mile. Maybe it was because I had to keep my hand on my ear, which felt like a rapper holding one of his headphones. Regardless, I want to be clear that I’m not proud of any of this.
“The vibe here is way too casual, folks, and I need someone to take charge of my situation. Who is responsible for getting antibiotics?”
Apparently when I’ve lost a good amount of blood, it seems like a good idea to use the word folks.
My attitude didn’t land great with most of the nurses, but one cute, very competent-looking blond nurse seemed as if she was relieved that someone finally addressed the elephant in the emergency room. She also seemed to be fed up by the fact that there were eight people in a room with eight other bleeding people but no clear pecking order of who was to stop whose bleeding. She chirped “I’m on it” and left the room. I don’t know her, but I was proud of her.
The ER doc wasn’t impressed by my heroic speech. He rolled his tongue around in his pigment-less mouth as he sauntered over to me. He gave me that look men give women when they think we’re being dramatic. I’ve seen this look more times than I can count. I was gonna say “a million times” but don’t want to actually be dramatic.
“Ma’am, you need to calm down, you’re not gonna die.” As if that weren’t patronizing enough, he gesticulated toward me, sort of like a mini “Heil Hitler” right at my face. Now, before I tell you about the emotional carnival that followed this gesture, I’ll admit that I’m still not exactly sure what mansplaining means, but if this wasn’t it, I’m gonna need a word for whatever he had just done. He cunt-descended to me? Dr. Dick-ed me? Ego-farted on me? I guess I don’t even know how to mansplain it.