The Not So Emergency Room


It was a quiet evening in Kimball dining hall when I noticed it was a little too quiet.  I couldn’t hear squat out of my left ear and I attributed it to water being lodged in my ear from my shower before dinner. The lack of hearing led me to attempt all the old tricks, jerking my head violently, jumping up and down on one foot with my head tilted, to no avail. My great sense of hearing had been taken for granted, and now that i was without it I was going nuts, and I had had enough. I plugged my nose, closed my mouth, and tried to use sheer pressure to get rid of the clog in my ear. ‘POP,’ I knew something had gone wrong as soon as it happened. Apparently your inner ear helps you maintain balance, and once my ear drum popped, I got vertigo and couldn’t see straight at all. I got light-headed and my ear started throbbing terribly. After a few hours and consulting my doctor back home, I found myself in a Public Safety car on my way to Umass Memorial Emergency Room. The awkwardness floating in that car was unbearable.  Not only could I barely hear what the lady officer was saying, but I could honestly care less at this point given my current physical state.  I arrived at the emergency room and scurried inside holding my ear for dear life because it felt like it was going to fall off. Each step was a challenge and my vision was skewed due to the ‘spinning’ effect, but I was determined to get through the ER doors to reach the holy grail of medical attention, so I thought.

As soon as I walked through the sliding doors, I saw a tacky ‘Welcome’ sign as if anyone working there was actually the least bit enthused to welcome yet another patient into their cramped emergency room.  I stumbled over to the triage while there was a loud ‘wooshing’ sound penetrating my ear as if I were holding a conch shell up to it.  I signed a few papers and then played the waiting game for 4 hours, yes, on a school night.  During those four hours I noticed the other patients getting increasingly irritated, most of whom had been there for longer than I had.  An elderly Spanish man writhed in pain gripping his leg as his frantic wife tried to calm him down.  A 25 year old guy sat quietly in the corner with his hood on and a large white towel wrapped around his hand.  An obese, old man tooled around in his wheelchair, truly pressing its limit as it squeaked and cried under the enormous weight of the man.  The weird, bald security guard sat at the front desk greeting and bidding farewells to incoming and outgoing nurses and doctors in the most annoyingly monotonous voice you could ever imagine.  These are the characters I watched closely for the whole visit more or less. There were no life-threatening cases so the emergency room staff was moseying around taking their sweet time.  One by one, the patients who stood out to me less were called in through the daunting double doors, and I soon enough I was left alone in the waiting room with baldy.

I must have dozed off because the next thing I knew it was 1 o’clock in the morning and the feminine male nurse was shouting my name from the double doors, and he sounded quite perturbed.  When I got up and walked over, the pain came back ten-fold and he had the nerve to ask me, “Did you not hear me calling your name?!” I replied, “Sorry I’ve been waiting here for 4 hours and I can’t hear shit.” We ended up laughing together and he apologized, quickly remembering I was the patient with the blown eardrum.  I sat in an examination room and a doctor hurried in as if I were the one to make his life so seemingly miserable.  He looked in my ear and told me I had perforated my tympanic membrane, (there was a hole ruptured in my eardrum).  I was told I could do nothing about it and I wouldn’t be able to hear much out of my left ear for at least a month.  Public safety picked me up and brought me back to campus, and unless I’m on the verge of death, you won’t find me going back to that emergency room any time soon.

'The end of the wait'

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