Night in ER Puts Things In Perspective

At my age, crushing chest pains are nothing to take lightly. Also, anxiety over my health has been exacerbated by President Clinton's recent heart surgery. Reports of his symptoms were similar to what I had been experiencing, so I reluctantly overcame my fears and went to St. Vincent's Medical Center on Staten Island.

The real emergency room of any large urban hospital is not at all like the one in the NBC television show "ER." There may be the same hustle and bustle, but there simply are not that many doctors around. Here on Staten Island, with the closure of Bayley Seton and Doctor's Hospital, the strain has fallen on the three remaining hospitals, St. Vincent's and Staten Island University Hospital's North and South units.

Once a patient is determined to be out of immediate danger, as I was, the individual is likely to be parked in a curtained space and forgotten. Then, if the patient is to be admitted, the wait

begins for a bed. It took more than 10 hours before I was moved upstairs.

As the gurney I was on was moved from one space to another throughout the evening, each new neighboring patient was in considerably worse condition than I was. I gradually felt I was the healthiest patient there, in spite of my discomfort, and tests the following day gave me a clean bill of health, heart-wise.

Screams from a man in pain pierced the air. A man who was drunk wandered around annoying the busy staff, while a crew of police and EMT personnel escorted trauma patients inside.

One teenager was sitting on a cot opposite a gurney that held his father, who was lying unconscious with a bandaged head. The son's face was full of fear, as he seemed to be contemplating the worst that could happen.

I was sitting on a gurney that had been moved to an upright position, and I now had a pain in my derriere as well as chest pains. But next to me was an ashen-faced young man whose ebony skin was puckered and dry. A doctor kept repeating the same question to the weakened man: "Why did you come here?"

The busiest nurse, and the friendliest, was a woman named Cheryl, who kept apologizing for the long wait for a bed every time she spotted me. She and a young Russian nurse, Tatiana, came over to change the bedding of my neighbor. The curtain was pulled over for privacy, and I heard her apologize to the young man about the towels' being too rough for his tender skin but explain that they had to keep him clean. The smell of bodily waste drifted over to my area, and I wondered how anyone would choose a career that dealt with such unsavory tasks on a daily basis and then do it with such kindness and concern.

I am the type of person who normally would have been the first to complain about the long wait, but I had recently read Ben Stein's final Internet gossip column, "How Can Someone Who Lives in Insane Luxury Be a Star in Today's World?" In that superb column, he writes that he is no longer interested in writing about the glittering stars of the entertainment industry, because "they are not heroes to me any longer."

He describes the "real heroes" as those in the American military fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan who get little recognition as they live and die doing their duty.

"I am no longer comfortable being a part of the system that has such poor values. ... there are plenty of other stars in the American firmament," he says.

Mr. Stein names the policemen and women who patrol South Central, the orderlies and paramedics who tend to victims of accidents, the teachers, the nurses, and the scores of others doing jobs we can't even imagine doing. He writes, "Think of each and every fireman who was running up the stairs at the World Trade Center as the towers began to collapse."

I thought of Mr. Stein's column as I watched the heroes and heroines performing their duties all around me. To Mr. Stein's list of heroes I want to add the brave Iraqi men and women fighting with the coalition against the insurgents in spite of the danger they face. They are the real freedom fighters of the 21st century.

The night in the ER might seem to have been an ordeal, but to me it proved how lucky we are to live in America surrounded by so many good people.