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Friday Slide Show: The ER at Snow Moon
10 February 2023
Luck. Don't mention the word to us. We had to make a 911 call Monday afternoon for an ambulance, casually mentioning our patient was not likely to cooperate. So 911 sent the police. And the Fire Dept. And an ambulance. As the full moon rose in the February sky. The snow moon.
So we spent the evening in an Emergency Room bedeviled by drug overdoses and several police calls to restore order. Happens every full moon, the nurses told us.
The ER was part of a hospital that had been tagged for demolition before the Covid pandemic made it indispensable despite its seismic faults. Half of it was under construction while the other half was falling apart.
Our patient was furious at being detained and needed multiple shots of Atavan through her sweater to calm her down enough to take blood tests. That "calming down" took hours. The blood tests took hours. The wait for a room took hours. The wait for an elevator to that room that actually worked took 30 minutes.
Before we knew it, it was tomorrow.
Before we knew it, it was tomorrow.
To pass the time, we took out our iPhone 6 Plus and snapped a few images of what attracted us about the ancient ruin.
We are, of course, all ancient ruins in various stages of decay. And so we found some resonance in the off-kilter fixtures, the battered doorways, the vain efforts at order we found around us.
Oh, and there was a framed photograph of Lombard St. on one wall.
We can't fathom these hospital art displays. They are, no doubt, distractions from the life and death sentences being pronounced. But who, walking by, can actually stop a moment to enjoy them?
It was, instead, the odd electrical outlet or banged stainless steel corner that spoke most eloquently to us about life and death.
You will search long and wide before you find a more pithy appraisal of the issue than Axel Munthe's The Story of San Michele in which he, a doctor, confesses as he confronts his own demise that in his numerous combats with Death, it was not the enemy.
No, he argues, Life was the source of suffering. It was always tenacious in its fight to hang on. Death, instead, was a comfort, an end to suffering, to want, to pain. A relief.
Our great uncle asked us to find that book as he reached the end of his own life so he could reread that lesson. He was a pharmacist himself. And by some lucky miracle we found a copy in a used book store in North Beach. He was delighted.
And we, in turn, have never forgotten the last lesson he taught us.
