Where We Find Hope

by Olivia Williams

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

I am 21 years old, a college student with a job and a car, and I pay rent. Seemingly, I’ve checked all of the boxes for being an adult. But I was still crushed when the nurse told me that visitors weren’t allowed in the Emergency Room, or in the waiting room. My mom had been relegated to the car.

That morning, I’d gotten a voicemail responding to a call I’d made the day before to my primary care doctor. I had been experiencing some odd symptoms I hadn’t ever seen before, and wanted to ask a few questions. To my surprise, the nurse responded quickly and left a message encouraging me to go to Urgent Care. At Urgent Care, a few tests were run, and it was decided I should go to the Emergency Room instead. Now, here I was, watching as the only person I knew in the whole building walked through the door without me. I was terrified.

The first order of business was the nurse asking me to put another mask on top of the mask I’d come into the hospital wearing. She then shuffled me into a tiny room where she asked me a few procedural questions before shooing me out to the waiting room. It was a Tuesday afternoon, so the waiting room was fairly calm: one man waited in a wheelchair with what looked to be a broken leg; a little girl checked in with her mother and held up a bleeding hand for the receptionist. It was not what I had expected at all. Since March of 2020, it seems the only portrayals of hospitals are bustling ones, overflowing with COVID patients on ventilators and family members separated by plastic. But this waiting room was quiet, and they called my name fairly quickly.

Next, I was put on a gurney, where I waited in a little hallway between two rooms. Here was a bit more like the news: a seemingly endless parade of doctors and nurses rushed around, and the air was filled with the beeping of machines punctuated only by occasional announcements over a loudspeaker. Several different nurses stopped by my bed to ask questions that seemed to be the same as the intake ones, and I waited there for about an hour before being brought to an actual room. The differences between the two locations were slim – this room had curtains, and the bed didn’t have wheels – but it was clear that this was meant to be an upgrade.

At this point, my phone was dangerously close to dying, and I didn’t seem to be any closer to any answers than I had been walking through the door. I didn’t know how much longer I’d be in the hospital, and I certainly still didn’t know why I had been having the weird symptoms. Thankfully, my mother was able to ask a nurse to give me a phone charger, and I spent quite some time peering at Netflix shows on my tiny phone screen.

From start to finish, the only indications of the Emergency Room being in the midst of a global pandemic were the ugly yellow mask that I was asked to stretch over my other mask and the banning of visitors. Perhaps there was more urgency than there had been before the pandemic, but I didn’t see the throngs of breathless patients or filled beds that the news had promised me.

That’s certainly been something of a hope for me. Lately, I’ve certainly been finding myself staring slack-jawed at the news, as it flashes images of bombed Ukrainian cities, skyrocketing gasoline prices, and waving politicians. But I went to the Emergency Room, that place beyond the red signs that is supposed to only be visited when everything is the worst of the worst, and things weren’t that bad. Later, as I walked out into the parking lot, I even saw tiny flowers trying to poke their way through the soil in front of the hospital. Russians are risking arrest protesting against their own country. Americans have come together in record numbers, buying weeks of Airbnb stays for Ukrainian refugees and purchasing small pieces of art from Ukrainians over Etsy. Less consumption of gas may spell home for the climate crisis. And in one emergency room on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, a girl was let out with little emergency at all. Even there, with its waiting room full of broken bones, there is hope. There is always hope.

Categories: Editorials, Featured