Strange Encounters: Hospital Version by Denise Thompson-Slaughter

Recently, I had the displeasure of spending a few days in an overcrowded hospital because of a broken elbow, arm, and nose due to a close lateral encounter with an uneven sidewalk. Yes, I faceplanted. My one humorous memory of the adventure is due to a visitor who was a complete stranger.

As I lay on a gurney in an overflow trauma-unit hallway leading between an EMT entrance and the Emergency Room on my first evening, a white-haired gentleman of about my age (early 70s) came up and stood by my gurney, looking down at me sympathetically.

Hopeful, I asked, “Are you one of my doctors?” I had a lot of questions about what was going to happen and when—and also whether I’d be given more pain medication when what I’d been given in the ambulance wore off, which I feared would happen at any time there in the No-Man’s Land of the hallway. The man merely looked at me in alarm as if I were talking out of my head. I squinted at the badge he wore. It said, “ED. GUEST.”

“Oh!” I exclaimed, “So, who are you?” What did he want with me?

He looked even more alarmed, but then a change came over his face, and he echoed my “Oh! . . . I thought you were my wife!”

I stared at him. Poor wife! I thought. I was aware that my face was a mess and that no one had even taken time to wipe the now-dried blood off it from the copious nosebleeds I’d had after hitting the pavement. I could feel everything else on my face swelling, too. “I’m not your wife, but I hope you find her and that she’s okay!”

He said something like, “I hope you’re okay, too,” and wandered off, seeming embarrassed and defeated.

I didn’t get much sleep that night, largely because my hallway spot was only about twenty-five feet from the door of the room where drunk/drugged and disorderly folks were deposited by burly policemen all night long. It wasn’t even a weekend, but the number of police officers traversing our hallway far outnumbered our one nurse. The disorderly were a loud group, expressing their opinions of the police in no uncertain terms and screaming obscenities at whatever poor medical staff were assigned to strap them down and give them antidotes to restabilize their metabolisms and mental balance. (The worst was a tall, pretty blonde woman who fought three officers for every inch of floor between the two doors.)

Sometime in the middle of the night, I was finally taken for X-rays before being wheeled back to my usual spot in the hallway. A couple hours after that, an actual doctor or surgeon came by to tell me he’d seen my X-rays, and I would be getting surgery—maybe even an elbow replacement—in a few hours. So, no, I couldn’t have anything to eat or even some water, which I desperately wanted.

Marlissa—an excellent and caring “traveling nurse” assigned to New York from Arizona for several months and whom I dubbed “The Angel of the Hallway”—told me about five hours after the doctor’s visit that my surgery had been repeatedly bumped because motorcycle accident victims kept arriving during the night in more desperate shape than myself. The same late-October warm spell that had encouraged me out on the leafy root-raised sidewalks to walk someplace I normally would drive had invited the area motorcyclists out to pursue their summertime sport of racing around the city’s ring roads in the middle of the night, much to the annoyance of those of us who preferred to sleep at night. And now karma had come for us all—walkers and bikers and drunks alike. Never trust a Scorpio warm spell.

Marlissa eventually agreed to accompany me to a restroom when I insisted I could not possibly use a bedpan in a public hallway and was capable of walking to a nearby toilet. Unfortunately, when news of this little trek reached the surgeon, he ruled that I needed a new X-ray in case I’d moved my dislocated and broken bones in leaving my gurney. So, I was sent back to X-ray in the morning before finally receiving part one of my treatment—resetting the one dislocated bone in a procedure euphemistically called Reduction, under a very potent combination of brief anesthetic that included a five- or ten-minute trip on the large-animal tranquilizer ketamine.

After the second X-ray, I was left outside the lab, waiting for my ride back to the trauma hallway. A rumpled man came up and stood silently by my gurney and stared at me. I recognized him. “Hi, Ed,” I said. “I’m not your wife.”

“What?!” is all he could seem to say out of his astonished embarrassment.

“Is she getting an X-ray now too?”

“I’m sorry!” he replied, “but with your mask on and your hair is like hers. . . .”

I was getting curious about Mrs. Ed. “What’s her name?” I asked. He told me a three-syllable name that I’ve forgotten now. “Well, I’m here because I broke my elbow and my nose,” I summarized. “What brings your wife here?”

“Oh,” he said vaguely, “it’s complicated. She’s been here before….”  After an awkward pause, he thought to ask, “What’s your name?”

“Denise,” I replied. I pointed to his name tag with my good hand, proclaiming, “And you’re obviously Ed.”

He wrinkled his brow. “I’m not Ed,” he protested. “I’m Ted. Ed’s my brother.”

It was my turn to be confused. “But your name tag says Ed,” I pointed out. He looked down at it, surprised, and shrugged.

Just then, my regular gurney-pusher Gerald arrived, and I greeted him by name. I was grateful to the garrulous young man in X-ray for introducing us properly ten minutes earlier because I quickly realized that Gerald and other staff tended to treat me much more like a person than a parcel if I used their names occasionally. It’s apparently really easy to lose your identity if you spend much time in a hospital, as I believe Ed/Ted demonstrated.

While Gerald chatted with another of the “transport staff” about getting together to watch a Bills’ game, I said to Ed/Ted, “Well, bye, Ted. I hope your wife gets better quickly.”

“You, too,” he replied.

I didn’t see Ted again until the next day. Sometime between my strange ketamine anesthetic trip for the “reduction,” my third X-ray, and the 9 p.m. surgery to put a metal cap on my elbow to replace the pulverized bits and hold everything together, Ted again passed me in the overflow trauma hallway. He looked at me sheepishly. “Hi, Denise. How are you doing?”

“Okay. Hanging in there, thanks, Ted. How’s your wife?”

“Okay,” he nodded.

Seeing him again actually lifted my spirits. He seemed like a funny, nice man, just a bit befuddled. Also, I missed the company of my own husband, who has an immune system deficiency, so, quite reasonably, he doesn’t spend any more time in petri-dish environments than he has to. (Also, of course, he’s just creeped out by hospitals.)

Besides, who was I to feel superior to the befuddled? I still hadn’t recovered emotionally from my ketamine trip to outer space with alien surgeons in a cone-shaped medical ship with my vital, elemental, and DNA symbols displayed in spinning gold and silver glowing rectangles on an illuminated dome-shaped ceiling. But at least it had masked the agony of having my arm painfully reset. Maybe now I was just having a post-anesthesia Doctor Seuss hallucination, and I would be seeing Ed, Ted, Ned, and Red from bed for a few days. Better than the Grinch, I guess.

It was only when I got home that I started wondering if Ted/Ed was even real. Everybody knows that institutions like hospitals are filled with unhappy ghosts who don’t even realize they’ve passed over. We’ve all seen those TV episodes of The Ghost Whisperer and Medium, right?

I flashed back to my other hospital emergency trauma. When I was 19, I was a passenger in a top-heavy VW van named Sally Sailbus when it flipped over on a wet and oil-soaked Route 66 during the first spring rain. My left pelvis bone broke, and I spent forty days and forty nights in a small hospital in the desert near Grants, New Mexico. First, there was surgery, then a month of traction. The fifty-bed hospital was, I was told, chiefly a recipient of three kinds of medical issues:  car accidents from Route 66, drunks hit by cars while wandering down or passed out on Route 66, and Native Americans injured or suffering from cancer from working in the nearby uranium mine.

One day, while I was lying with forty pounds of weight hanging off my repositioned pelvis, I looked up to see a small Hispanic man in the room that I shared with a jaundiced and diabetic alcoholic named Louise, whose relatives smuggled liquor in for her. Louise regularly swiped the dessert off my dinner tray and insisted that the TV be on 24/7, even after midnight when it was just the station signal.

The small man stood at the foot of my bed and stared at me with tears in his eyes. “My wife,” he said. “My leetle ones. All gone now! Accident. Used to be here.”  [Did they die in my bed!? I wondered.]  “All gone,” he repeated. “I alone now.”

“I’m so sorry!” I sympathized after recovering from my horror. “That’s terrible!”  He nodded and left. But the scene was repeated at least once more before I was discharged. Was he a ghost? Or was he just a lonely man haunted by the last place he’d seen his family?

Is it possible that for every 100 squeamish American males who hate and avoid visiting hospitals, there is one who cannot stay away and morosely patrols the halls day after day? If so, I hope they find their peace.

As for my incorrigible desert roommate Louise, she checked herself out after a week or so, but I could hear her coming back a few afternoons later. I heard her yelling in the hallway, where, according to my nurse Patty, Louise pulled down her panties and, laughing maniacally, took a crap in the middle of the hallway floor.

“Please don’t bring her back in here,” I begged Patty. “Please! It’s somebody else’s turn to share a room with her!”

Whether Patty had any influence or not, I don’t know, but soon, I could hear Louise being settled in the room next door. Late that night, I awoke to a lot of commotion coming through the wall, an alarm beeping, and finally, someone calling, “Code!”  Louise had died. My sense of solemnity at the death of a fellow human struggled mightily with the gratitude I felt that she had been in a different room at the time. I was amazed to learn she’d been just under 50 because she had looked thirty years older. I wonder if her ghost is still there, wandering the hallways, making sweets disappear, and vibrationally turning on televisions?

You meet all kinds of people in a hospital. Hospitals truly are the borderlands between life, death, and phantasm, and sometimes, it’s hard to tell which is which.