Emergency Rooms

I haven’t blogged in a couple days because my three year-old daughter has been suffering from a bout of gastroenteritis. Despite our efforts to keep her hydrated, yesterday she got to the point where a trip to the emergency room was necessitated for re-hydration therapy. We spent about eight hours at the hospital while she went through tests and then had water, saline and glucose given to her through an IV drip. Today, my daughter is doing somewhat better, but still distinctly under the weather.

While we were in the emergency room, a relatively young man in what looked like military-style exercise clothing in a bay a couple down from the pediatric session went into what to my untrained eye looked like cardiac arrest, and although the medical staff clearly did their best, he died.

It’s not my point to blog about what happened to reflect on the fleeting nature of life, although what happened did give me pause, but rather to reflect on how the emergency room seemed to function as a system.

In a TV show there might have been a great deal of attention and focus on his passing, and while I don’t think there was anything disrespectful about what I could see in how his body was subsequently handled, it was a busy emergency room and there were a lot of other patients to deal with.  I guess I don’t know what I was expecting, but I suppose it’s not surprising that death is relatively normal part of the process of a hospital emergency room.

I intended to have a point relating to frame of reference and education, but I think I’ll leave off here for the moment.