Love in the ER

Two weeks ago, my husband shook me awake at 4:00 a.m. “I’m going to the emergency room,” he said.

I tried to blink myself awake. Never much of a complainer, Ryan had grown increasingly miserable over the past few days due to a pain in the roof of his mouth. That night, the pain had kept him from sleeping.

I think I mumbled something along the lines of, “What? How?” as I sat up in bed.

“I’ll take an Uber,” he said.

My sleep-fogged brain considered this. My pillow was calling to me. And Ryan had taken himself to the ER alone before—Boxing Day 2014 when we had a toddler and a newborn and he’d stepped on a (shockingly sharp!) toy excavator, slicing a deep gouge into his toe. Then, like now, I knew it was a gray area sort of injury: requiring immediate medical attention, but not something life-threatening. And here he was giving me an out to back to sleep…

“No, I’ll take you,” I murmured, mentally running through the tasks this would require, what I needed to bring, whom I needed to notify.

***This summer I’ve been thinking about what it actually takes to make community work. Much has been written about the loneliness crisis, growing rates of estrangement, how we are replacing eye contact with screen staring.

Somewhere in the past few months I heard the phrase, “Everyone wants a village, no one wants to be a villager,” and I wonder, could it really be that simple? Is our lack of community simply our own fault?

***

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Ryan and I wound up at Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center. It’s a level one trauma center that I only knew from newspaper write ups about gunshot victims. I’d hoped that 4:00 a.m. on a Wednesday morning would be relatively quiet, that he’d get a quick exam, maybe some pain medicine, and we’d be on our merry way.

We were greeted by five security guards, two police officers, and a metal detector. The waiting room benches hosted sleeping forms surrounded by piles of plastic bags and dirty backpacks, the tell-tale baggage of homelessness.