I lay on a gurney for hours. I was wet and the hospital was cold and nobody came to see to me. I was simply wheeled into a curtained off portion of the emergency room and left to wonder if I'd lose my toe. I still hadn't looked at it. I knew better than to do that. I had put the one skinny pillow they had given me over my eyes so that I could not see anything. But everything was beginning to combine: the shock, the pain that had finally begun in ernest, and the wedding of my dampness to the cold. I began to shiver violently.
Finally, after an indeterminate time, a nurse I never saw asked if I was O.K. I asked her if I could have some blankets. Sure she said, and she gave me one. She said that they were very busy and that they were trying to find a doctor who took my insurance. A little while later, someone came in and took me to be X-rayed. The pain by then was becoming overwhelming. When the x-ray technician moved my toe, I could feel it give like water and wanted to puke. Then I was back in the emergency room where I listened to an old woman who was dying. I heard men talking about her. I don't know who, exactly, but she had come from a nursing home one said. There was no one to contact, no relatives. She carried on for hours in some delirium of death, talking and moaning and groaning away. I shook and shivered and froze.
Finally a nurse came in and said she could give me something for pain. One shot and I the shivering grew less, the cold. Why had it taken so long?
More lying on the gurney, more listening to the dying woman, the pillow still covering my eyes.
Then a bustling, a male voice, brash and confident. He wanted to take a look at "that" toe. He asked me questions, I answered, never taking the pillow from my eyes. I longed for the darkness, for warmth. He would save my toenail, he said. He would put it back in place and stitch it. Holy shit, holy shit, what was he doing.
"Jesus Christ, doc, you're a fucking barbarian," I told him. Nothing he did felt good or right. "This is medieval."
"What are you complaining about," he retorted, "you've had something for pain. They didn't have any of that."
When he had finished with the torture and gone, the nurse who I still had never seen came over and said close to my ear, "He's an asshole. He thinks he's a fighter pilot or something. You O.K.? I'll see if I can get you some more pain relief."
Did she say that? He was an asshole. I wish I had looked at him. When I was well, I'd come back and kick his faux-barbarian ass.
My mother picked me up in the afternoon. It looked as if the hurricane was turning north. It wouldn't come ashore here. We were lucky.
I wasn't sure, though. I wasn't feeling too lucky at all.
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