Lou had a regular rotation of nursing students, medical interns, and attending physicians visiting him in a steady stream during his first few hours in the ER.
Each group’s leader asked Lou the same questions, and Lou willingly answered. He gave them plenty of details about his presenting symptoms, and every time, the attending physicians and their students left the room with the same baffled expressions on their faces.
One time, I stepped out to get myself a cup of coffee, and when I returned, Lou was surrounded on every side of the bed by a group of medical students. There was a slim female doctor dressed in an official looking lab coat up at the head of the bed. I recall that she was quite a stunner.
The rest of her students were awkwardly leaning in to check out Lou’s blatantly exposed penis. As I fully entered the room, I heard Lou say, “Big Jim usually has more game than this…” and the whole group nervously laughed at his joke.
That’s Lou.
He always had a way of making what was happening to him less awful by finding the humor in it. But once the room finally cleared, and I could see Lou’s face, I knew the strain and the pain were starting to take a toll. We were waiting on some lab work to come back, and once it did, then the urology department was supposed to be sending down a nurse to insert a catheter, and to inject Lou with some special dye so they could run some scans on Lou’s (sad) kidneys.
But until the tests were run, they didn’t even offer Lou an aspirin to help him cope with the pain. All the poking, prodding, and inspecting were starting to actually bruise Lou’s abdomen and thighs, and “Big Jim” was staring to look greenish-purple.
Waiting in a hospital is always exhausting, but for Lou, it was starting to get unbearable. His arms were covered in bandages from all the blood the nurses drew so they could run countless tests to rule out every possibility. By that time, Lou was also officially running a low-grade fever, and his normally healthy blood pressure was elevated.
So a nurse hooked up Lou’s arm to this horribly noisy machine that kept taking his BP every twenty minutes or so. When the machine would click on, the sound was so loud it was causing my BP to skyrocket.
Eventually, a nurse with a clipboard and digital scanning device came into the room. She scanned the barcode on Lou’s wristband, checked a reading on her scanner, and then informed Lou that she would be taking him to the urology wing to start his kidney scans. Soon after, another woman dressed in a dark suit came in to ask Lou some billing questions before the other nurse could take him to urology for the scans.
The lady in the suit seemed overworked and very tired, but I hoped that she would at least be understanding about our unusual circumstances. But it was hard to put a lot of faith in her understanding qualities when she started asking all of her questions. She asked her various queries in a very loud voice – as if Lou was hard of hearing – and she would quickly move on to the next question before Lou could explain his answers in any kind of detail.
Clearly, she just wanted the facts — not the back story.
The suit lady mostly wanted to confirm that Lou didn’t have insurance — of any kind — and that he was currently without a permanent home address or employer. Lou graciously confirmed all of her awkward questions about our financial health while the nurse started pulling out clear tubes, and these little blue towels from a stack of drawers that she wheeled in from the hallway.
After Lou signed a few papers on the suit lady’s clipboard, the urology nurse wheeled Lou out of the room on his gurney. Over her shoulder, the nurse promised me that she’d bring Lou back to “this room” in a little while.
Before the suit lady left, she handed me a pen and a packet of papers to fill out. Then, she gave me her card and instructed me to join her in her office on the third floor when I was finished so she could formerly process Lou as an “indigent patient.”
Indigent patient?
That’s what Lou was?
When I was alone in the hallway outside of Lou’s ER bay, I started the daunting task of filling out pages and pages of intake forms that had hundreds of basic questions that I wasn’t sure how to answer. Outside of Lou’s full name, marital status, and his social security number, every other question on these forms had no stable or accurate answer to give.
Did I put our old address in Sarasota — where we’d recently been evicted — as our “Current Mailing Address”?
Should I put down “Wrinkle Cream Salesman” as Lou’s “Job Title”?
And should I just guess what his income from the wrinkle cream company was going to be?
Those questions are just the tip of the iceberg.
When I was trying to reduce my life to entries on a medical intake form, I’ve never felt worse about myself.
