ER Horror

By Robert Roth •

This post is excerpted from “Book of Pieces“. “Book of Pieces” is a combination of fiction, personal/political prose, an interview, a libretto and some poetry. The first piece was written in the late ’70s when Roth was 37. The last in 2016 at 72.

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Last night my mother was still in the emergency room after over 36 hours there. When I had left her the night before they said that she would be in a room of her own in a couple of hours. She was moved from place to place inside the emergency room and for a while in a holding room. When Marlene and I got there last night she had been misplaced, then found in a dirty room off from the other patients. Her door was kept open by a bin filled with dirty laundry. They had a huge security guard by her door and she had been held down with cloth restraints. She thought she had been kidnapped and held in a private house in Queens by a mother who had complete control over her son. And she was being tortured. She did not understand how a Jewish woman could do such a thing.

When we got there the restraints had been removed because two friends of hers Marta and Nellie raised hell. She had big bruises on her wrists. I brought her to the hospital because she was hallucinating that she was hearing music; after a while she knew the music was an hallucination but was still enjoying what she was hearing and was pretty funny about the whole thing. After endless hours of hell Marlene and I got her moved to a very nice room on a clean floor with people who were very kind and attentive. No restraints, and instead of a security guard the person she was with when we left was someone engaged in an interesting conversation with her. And so there she is now. Will learn more today what they are going to do next. I won’t even go into the horrors of the first day. I will probably need some help in figuring out what to do when hopefully she gets out.

Martha and Nelli two sentries standing by her bed. They asked the person in charge of the ER. “What have you done to her? Just hours before she could speak brilliantly about anything.”

The ER a dungeon of neglect and horror. A great investigative reporter in her early writing career, Marlene Nadle has the same focus, determination and smarts she had then. She had the almost legendary ability to track a naked general sitting in a sauna in the most inner secret sanctums of the Pentagon and get him to reveal whatever information she was looking for. And here she was putting all her amazing talents to use as she organized the entire ER to get my mother moved to another floor. She even spun around those whose job it was to create the obstacles, recruiting them into an army up against a heartless almost criminally negligent hospital bureaucracy that they temporarily forgot they were the mainstays of.

A young woman wearing a white uniform with playful tumbling colorful animals on it came and rolled my mother on a gurney out of the ER into the elevator up to the 6th floor.

A stunning, very pregnant Indian nurse greeted her with attention and kindness. My mother thinking we were at a book party asked her whether she was a writer or a publisher. A kind man, Marlene thinks a nurse, I think an aid, sat with her afterwards talking with her as we left. This changed later into an alternative memory about being brought to the backroom of a bookstore to be examined by a doctor and his beautiful pregnant wife. My mother even now perplexed about why they would have an examining room in the back of a bookstore.

Walking briskly with her cane, (this would be the last time she could walk this way) she came into my room at 3 in the morning. Two if you had turned back the clock. She turned on the lights and talked about the loud music in the other room. There was no music and it was clear that she was hallucinating even though she insisted that the music had stopped. I spoke to a doctor who said I should get her to the hospital immediately. Anyway from there to get her to the hospital was an endless horror with me going into near nervous breakdown (falling on the floor pleading with her) unable to convince her to go. Finally she agreed after speaking to a doctor I had called, and then how to get there. Finally we got to the worst of the choices of hospitals. The one she least wanted to go to and the one she insisted on going to. One ambulance driver tried to convince us (after the fact) we should never have called him. He said all she had was music in the ear something older people who are alone often get. It is now more than two years later. In retrospect he was right.

On the way to the hospital my mother realized that the music she had heard was really in her mind because she was hearing it in the ambulance in a much softer way. She was totally intrigued by the beauty of the music knowing it was not real and yet enjoying it nonetheless. The emergency room was harrowing. It took hours before she was seen. When my brother and I went out for lunch she totally went berserk. And then things went from nightmarish to worse than nightmarish. Finally after all sorts of insanity, a really cool doctor examined her. My mother charmed him with her descriptions of the music, sang for him, and he seemed somewhat hopeful they could figure out the reason for her constant falls and the music. This is the short version. But my mother was having multiple emotional collapses throughout the day, panic fear, almost the breakdown of her whole psychic structure. And then she would calm down and then, as she was with the doctor, look absolutely stunning, speaking with enormous clarity, poetry and brilliance. On the day I brought her, I wasn’t sure that it is what it was until later, since what she was saying was always plausible; she was much more alert, energetic and incredibly sharp and articulate than she had recently been so I thought maybe things might get better. Not sure when they will send her home. She didn’t suffer a stroke. Her vital signs were okay. The hospital is worried; they want her to have round the clock care at home. Two women Nelli and Martha who come in and who have a strong bond with her obviously can’t do it alone. She is afraid to lose them and is afraid of new people. But we have to figure something out.

Read more about Robert Roth here.