Waiting in ER

“I’m sorry sir, but we cannot attend to you at this moment, there are others here who have much more grave injuries than you, and you look absolutely fine to me.” the nurse responded coldly. “You don’t understand, I am suffering from a tremendous pain in my head!” responded the man. “Sir, it could just be a headache, why don’t you go home and lie down, or if you insist, I can not help you, and you must wait like everybody else.” responded the nurse coldly again. The man, frustrated took a seat and began to wait. He took a look around and saw that the ER waiting room was almost full.

He noticed a man, slumped over in his seat, clutching his arm, and upon a closer look. the man was bleeding profusely from the arm. Then a loud shriek overpowered all the noise, it was a woman who was clutching a boy, perhaps her son. The boy had his eyes closed and had a peaceful look on his face. Immediately, a band of nurses came rushing in carrying the boy on a stretcher, with the sobbing mother in tow.

The man began to reinspect his own injury, the man was not bleeding from the head, as far as he knew. He began to think of the incident that had only happened the day before, a beating that he had received countless times before by the same old bully. Of course, all the other beatings had never left him feeling like this. The bruises and black eyes, he had begun to get accustom to, but not the dizziness he was feeling now. Ever since the beating, the man could not get a grip on himself, having trouble even with the simple process of going for a walk. He was getting up much later than he had been used to, and when he did, only with a tremendous amount of effort was he able to make his way out of bed.

The man took another long look around the waiting room, almost nothing had changed, the wait it seemed, would take a great amount of time. What he did notice was the clock, in what felt like no time, he had kept himself thinking for thirty minutes. A sharp jolt of pain hit him, and it only seemed that the pain was getting worse and worse.

He felt tired, sleepy in fact. The sights around him only seemed to slow down even more and more as the pain grew and grew. This, though, he did not pay attention to, just to the blurs all around what seemed to be the waiting room. A particularly light blue blur made its way around an even larger brown blur and started to make its way towards him.

“Sir,” the blur said, “the doctor will see you now.” He was having trouble making out what she was saying after that, and he just continued to stare at the blur, the blur continued, “Sir? Are you feeling okay?” The man continued to stare, he looked down to what he believed to be the floor, and slowly closed his eyes, and went to sleep.