by Michael Bettencourt

Created on: April 26, 2008

LATE NIGHT MUSINGS IN THE EMERGENCY ROOM

2 a.m. The emergency room. A late movie with Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. Few of us here - an older man, unshaved. A young boy, maybe eleven or twelve. Me. A woman with her arm in a cast. A stout blond secretary, with lank hair to her shoulder blades, takes my information - pleasant, indifferent. Puts a plastic band around my right wrist. 2:10 a.m.

This cough. It's been mine for a week. Actually, it's not really true to say I have this cough; the cough really has me. When my throat in mid-word goes dry and I start getting the spasms, it's as if there's a pair of vice grips on my larynx, as if there was electricity in my throat.

A nurse comes to get me, makes me wear a backless smock. Takes the ticking of my pulse, the double bump of my blood pressure, my deposition of illness. Then she leaves me alone. I'm in a slight fog mixed from fever, cough suppressant, and sleeplessness. I have visions of the other people in other rooms down the hall waiting for the ministrations of the doctor; all of us have been edged out of our usual routines by sickness, brought to this bright, clean place to find help we cannot give ourselves. We are weak, and maybe a bit afraid, and we just want to go home.

The doctor is young, friendly, speaking with a slight Southern drawl which is oddly comforting at 3 a.m. He places the cold ear of the stethoscope against my skin, has me lie down and thumps my stomach as if it were a ripe watermelon. As I put my shirt on his professional jury tone tells me I have a slight touch of bronchitis; he gives me prescriptions and a starter dose of the medicine.

Driving home through the thin pre-matinal darkness, back to the bed I'd left two hours ago, now having a name for the enemy and some tactics of medication, I think: Two generations ago I could have died from what I now will trounce in ten days. Through the luck of the genetic draw, through no particular effort of my own, I'm in a time and place that has amoxicillin. I am as glad for that fact as I am mystified by it.

Standing on the porch of my house, knowing that in a few moments I'll be cocooned and warm, still in that fog of drugs and fatigue, I believe I can hear the stertorous, hesitant, placid, staccato breathing of thousands of people in their dense sleeps, wearing out the hours until they have to rise and breathe in their routines, inhaling their days until they sleep again and breathe themselves again into light. If life is anything, it's this constant oscillation between light and dark, between lightness and gravity. Amoxicillin is a form of light, a breath to get me to dawn. I open my door and deliver myself to bed.

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