squeak of the wheel

I had to make a companion visit to the emegency room earlier this week (my roommate thought she was having a heart attack or something...turned out to be a false alarm). Although it was slightly annoying, it did make for some excellent people watching--the three boys with minor gunshot wounds chatting on their cell phones as they waited for treatment, the local drunk getting his fingers checked out, and the woman from the morning bus stop.

I was particularly struck by the fact that on a random Tuesday night in February, I seemed to recognize half the emergency room population. The local drunk is often sighted outside my front door drinking out of his mini airplane-sized vodka bottle (a minus of living above a liquor store). I often see the bus stop woman in the mornings. We don't talk, but we often awknowledge each other with a small smile. What was she doing in the emergency room at 11:30 on a Tuesday night? I didn't get the answer since we stuck with our bus stop ritual. Even though the scenery had changed, our manners and rituals did not.

Although I had never been to an emergency room before, it makes sense that there would be a lot of interesting human dynamics to observe. I wasn't banking on animal watching though. That was more of a surprise. While waiting for my roommate to have her vitals checked, out of the corner of my eye I spotted something small and black dart across the floor. Based on the reactions of the people around me, it quickly became clear what was so anxious to get from one end of the ER to the other: A mouse. People's feet went straight up on their chairs and there was a fair amount of yelping. Not the most heart warming scene in an ER. At least it wasn't a rat.