This post has nothing to do with marketing, and everything to do with listening and conversations. Last Thursday night I wound up in the emergency room of a major urban hospital because the right side of my face was pins and needles, my right eye was sagging and the pain in my head exploding.  (The good news: it was a “massively complex migraine” and not a stroke.)

Being in the ER was like being dropped into a parallel universe.  Because I wasn’t really sick I was able to both listen to and engage in some bizarre yet fascinating conversations – all of which educated me more in 18 hours about what’s going on in our world than a year of my usual information sources.

Waiting

Two young children played around the vending machines, demanding that their Pakistani-born father buy them candy.  He was visibly nervous, waiting for news about his wife and kept trying to pull his children away from the candy machines. Two 60-ish Italian-American women came by and not only bought the kids a treat, but taught them how to say, “Starburst.”  The children then danced and sang “Starburst, Starburst.”  Such a simple, kind gesture among strangers.

Inside

Once in an ER cubicle, I met my nurse Geeta, a gracious, professional young Indian woman and mother of babies 8-months old and two years old.  Geeta works three 12-hour shifts a week, 7 p.m. to 7 a.m.  I asked if she would have child care help on Friday morning so that she could sleep when she got off her shift.  Alas, no.

I asked Geeta what it was like to work a long graveyard shift. She explained that things were likely to get crazy after 2 a.m. when the bars let out. Lots of accidents and shootings. Thursdays are bad nights and Fridays are the worst in emergency rooms. Sure enough at 2:15, a beep started blaring, followed by the Code Blue announcement.  With calm yet urgency the teams set off.

I asked the 30-ish African American woman who wheeled me over to the CAT scan room whether it was hard working all night long. “Absolutely. But I’m going to school during the day and I need to work at night to pay for school and living expenses. I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to work days when I graduate.”  She is studying to be a surgical assistant.

The Brown neurology resident assigned to my case was nervous. Here he was with a 50 year-old woman with all the signs of a stroke in the dead of night and he was on his own.  His earnestness, respect, clarity of communications, and patience with an impatient patient showed maturity and judgment that I rarely see in much older people.

In the ER cube next door I overheard two state prison guards talking. Evidently there had been an accidental shooting that night and an inmate was injured. That inmate was next door, footcuffed and handcuffed to the bed, guarded by two policemen. When the doctor came in to do the exam, it was quite the procedure to take off some of the cuffs but not all. The inmate screamed at the guards, and the guards remained steady.  I imagine that they’d had quite a night already. One of their own had made a mistake that evening and a different kind of chaos was sure to follow. Every 15 minutes or so one of the guards would go in and wash his face to try to stay awake, while the inmate slept. (The restrooms were right across the hall from my cube.)

On the other side was a Hispanic man who spoke no English.  He had signs of a heart attack but the English-speaking doctors couldn’t be sure. It took two hours before a translator came.  Turns out that this man has no primary care physician and had been experiencing symptoms for days. Damage had been done.

Upstairs

In order to get an MRI that night I had to be admitted to the hospital.  At 5 a.m. I went up to a room to await the test results. The only room available was in the women’s oncology floor.  Early that morning I met my roommate Kim, a human resources director and mother of four children, who had just recently learned that she had leukemia.  Her month-long chemo treatments were starting at 10 a.m.

Around 8 a.m. Kim and I started talking and, laptop on her lap, she told me that she hoped to work at least five hours a day during her hospital stay, and she was looking forward to catching up on some good movies.  The oncology team swept in explaining what was about to happen beginning at 10 a.m.  A social worker spent extra time, suggesting that Kim get a notebook to keep track of questions, concerns, feelings.  The hospital chaplain came by with kinds words and prayers.  By 11:30 a.m, after 90 minutes of the first injection, Kim was experiencing massive headaches. Her sister and husband came to visit but she was already suffering in order to get her life back.

Leaving

I was discharged mid-day, but was marked by the short experience.  While I hate to pay taxes, I wish for better child care for Geeta, more educational loans so people like the CAT scan woman don’t have to work all night to go to school all day, a more humane medical training program so residents aren’t working such long, stressful shifts, and a better health care system so the Spanish-speaking man can more easily find a primary care physician and so that people like me don’t hog up precious resources when the likelihood of anything seriously wrong is so minute. We can’t continue to allocate resources as we do because of the risk of malpractice.

But most of all I wish more of us the patience of the prison guards, the calmness of the ER professionals in the midst of chaos, the determination of Geeta to work all hours to provide a better life for her family, the clear communications of the neurology medical student, the generosity of strangers buying children a candy bar, and most of all the optimism of Kim.

I have been inspired and feel fortunate to be a citizen of a world with such remarkable people.