Deirdre Neilen, PhD: Alice Irwin is a poet and a cancer survivor from Manlius, New York. Her poem "A Visit to the Emergency Room" gives a damning portrait of what it means to say our hospitals are understaffed and over-busy. We need to do better.
"A Visit to the Emergency Room"
I found my brother at the end of the corridor
on a gurney shoved up against the wall,
hooked up in a space with a number,
docile, dazed, pale and confused,
needing help to fill in the blanks.
I staked my claim on a folding chair
and a tiny patch of hallway,
prepared to stand guard for another siege:
the endless weight between tests and results
and the usual barrage of redundancies.
He struggled to rise from a seizure fog and
make sense of what was happening to him.
We waited for hours, overlooked and ignored
amidst the constant drone of buzzers and beepers,
also unheard and unnoticed.
I finally managed to corner a nurse who
tracked down the doctor in charge.
Discharge papers were stuffed in my hand with
"So sorry, so busy, go follow up elsewhere."
Beside me, my brother limped down the hall,
out into the dark, a forgotten phantom.