Part 2 Emergency
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“Wait a minute. I’ve got to go back. I don’t have hearing aid batteries.”
“Is that absolutely necessary? We’ve got to get going.”
“If my batteries go bad, I can’t communicate.”
He resists saying anything more, and I’m out the door. My hand shakes at the keyhole.
The ambulance is a lumbering elephant climbing the extreme hill, with lights flashing in a silent two a.m. morning. Inside the huge, high vehicle, we move slowly through a black and white dreamscape of midtown lights that stand like mournful, unfeeling observers to a tragedy seen nightly, as they watch us drift by. The sound of the engine whispers in a soft chugging cadence, belying its actual speed — a diesel tugboat making its way through empty city streets.
Against the other-worldliness, the reality of Diane’s pain makes my eyes weep. I turn away from the driver and stare out the window.
In The Emergency Room
A gurney is hard and narrow, not a comfort cot at all, made only for transport and utility. It’s a foreboding piece of soulless equipment. Its hard, noisy wheels bounce across the pavement toward the emergency entrance. A gurney has no regard for warm, throbbing flesh that harbors my wife’s traumatized soul. Ambient light floods the pavement and shows us the way to the cold glass doors – a light that holds hope and dread.
As we enter, my mind is only dimly aware of details – a corridor, innocuous narrow doors on the left. “They must be storage-room doors. What are they keeping behind those doors?” I wonder. A few people mill around down the hall. Our EMT’s open one door and begin to maneuver Diane’s gurney into a small emergency room.
A man’s groan grinds out from behind a white curtain in a corner of the room. Some kind of station occupies the far center. Someone in hospital garb stands studying a computer screen, her back to us. She offers no greeting or recognition of our presence.
Diane is rolled next to a larger mobile bed sitting in a vacant corner. Safety rails are lowered and she scoots herself from one to the other. She seems not to have moved throughout the ambulance journey. This animation of her body stirs a whisper of optimism.
The two-man rescue squad leaves, and with them the gurney, which, in that instant of endless eternity, had become so much a part of our lives.
Now there is a bigger gurney. A woman comes to my wife’s bed and starts putting monitors and tubes on and into her. Other workers walk through on nameless tasks. I am in an ant colony or aboard a Borg space cube witnessing drones going about their somehow-related jobs, desensitized to the human drama that surrounds them.
Leonard I. Tuchyner, Author
https://www.dldbooks.com/tuchyner/