Good Emergency Rooms are the great levelers. No one cares if you’re rich or poor, who your folks are, or what you do for a living. Almost everyone ends up in the ER eventually, whether they’re good guys or bad, gangsters or cops. Saints or sinners.
I spent more than 20 New Year’s Eves in Emergency Rooms or ICUs. Every year I’d see drunken people, many of them folks who normally didn’t drink much, if at all, who tried to cram a year’s worth of alcohol into a few hours. Over the years I saw thousands of New Year’s Eve patients.
Every year I remember one time when I met a true, honest to goodness hero.
She didn’t look like a hero. She looked like she was dressed for a nice dinner at an upscale restaurant, the kind where ties and jackets aren’t recommended for men, they’re required. Her makeup and hair were perfect. Pants and top? Donna Karan or similar, definitely not knockoffs.
She said she needed help getting her husband in to the ER. I took a wheelchair out.
Hubby was belted in to the back seat of a new SUV. He was filthy. Not muddy and dirty but street man sleeping by the dumpster in the alley filthy. Week long drug and body funk filthy.
It turned out this Hallmark movie stereotype suburban soccer mom had tracked him down to an Orange Mound crack house. She marched into the house in her $500 heels, found him passed out in a back room, dragged his semiconscious nasty butt across the floor, down the steps, through the yard, and somehow hauled him up into the car, strapped him down, and drove him to the hospital.
She decided he needed rehab. My ER doc and I agreed after he was medically cleared.
Nobody would take him. There were no rooms in any inpatient drug and alcohol center in my rolodex. Not in Memphis, not in West Tennessee, North Mississippi or Eastern Arkansas.
Finally, after several hours of begging phone calls we found a place that would take him IF he could get there by midnight.
Supermodel wife loaded him up and hauled him off. I went on to the next patient.
One year later I was in charge again in the same ER. I was in the supply room. I don’t remember what I was looking for, but I do remember hearing my name and a request to come to the South Desk.
When I got there, the first thing I saw was a cake. The first thing I heard were the words, “I brought you a cake. I just wanted to say thank you.”
“You don’t remember me? We were here last year. Tonight is his one year clean anniversary.” Turns out some heroes can bake.
