My Surreal LIfe

"Can you ladies help me?" she cried.

She was wearing pajamas, and a felted overcoat, and slipper shoes. Her hair was a mess, she held a plastic bag of squishy stuff in one hand and a pillow in the other. She was crying hysterically. My first thought was that she was homeless. But then I realized that I was standing in a hospital parking lot desperately sucking on a cigarette with a caretaker who was on a break. Maybe she'd broken out of the psyche ward.

She needed a ride to her doctor's office, which was a few blocks away, because the Emergency Room where she'd been waiting for four hours had somehow messed up her in-take and she'd been in a horrible car accident several days before and her son and daughter-in-law had dropped her off and gone back to Big Bear and she had possible fractures to her cervical vertebrae and several hematomas on her legs. What?! Neither of us had access to a car and she didn't like any of our other suggestions. She started walking away and the caretaker and I looked at each other and started feeling terrible. We looked at her limping through the rain and both reluctantly tried to think of what to do. Then we saw her pick up her cell phone and next thing we knew, she told us that her doctor would meet her back at the Emergency waiting room. She just needed help getting there.

So the caretaker and I took her things, each held one arm, and helped her through the pouring rain and into the Emergency Room. I gave her my hand, which she took hungrily, and helped her into a chair. I looked her in the eye and told her that it was going to be okay. I held onto her hand as she told us a garbled story about a car accident on a curvy mountain road and thinking that she was going to die. I noticed a rather large triple diamond wedding ring. She showed us a gigantic swollen knarly mess of an upper thigh and I started to believe her story a little. It didn't matter at that point whether or not her story was true anyway, I believed that she was in pain and needed me to sit there and hold her hand. She kept calling us "angels" and saying that her doctor would be right there.

It really wasn't that long until her doctor wandered in,maybe twenty minutes, but each moment seemed so full, it felt like hours. The lady pointed her out and I ran over to get her. The doctor didn't seem so enthused or even very concerned about her. The caretaker and I called out "good luck" and "good bye" and walked back to our little sheltered space beneath the parking garage. We lit up another pair of cigarettes and each took long drags. We chatted as if we were friends. We finished our smokes down to the filters. Then we walked slowly back into the hospital and back to our lives.