It went from scary to weird to hilarious. First the runner drops us at the wrong hospital, but we are given directions and put on a shuttle bus. Then another shuttle bus, whereupon Pretty Boy sees the word 'emergency' and decides we should go in, even though it clearly isn't the ER we've been directed to.
We go into the waiting room, the only white people (apart from the armed guard), speak to the sullen jobsworth at the desk and put Pieter's name and time an a clipboard. In the corner is probably the fattest guy I've ever seen, clutching a pair of hot-pink running shoes. The woman next to us is eating Cheez-its and occasionally burping/hacking/prolapsing.
Someone has their name called and a guy who looks like Wee-Bey in The Wire got up and went to the desk:
"This guy come in 20 minutes after me, he gettin registered before me. I jus had a kidney traaaansplaaant, you don't get me in there soon so's I can get mah medsin, ahm gonna hafta start doin sumtin."
He receives pretty much the same blank stare we got when I said "Good afternoon, we're looking for the walk-in center? My colleague needs to have his wound dressed."
The waiting room starts to fill up. The thing is, people are just walking in and ignoring the desk; they weren't signing the clipboard as far as I could see. Anyhoos we're finally called to the bulletproof glass and Precious Byrd processes Pretty Boy. A woman behind us calls her mother and goes into a spiel:
"Come get me up out this mu'fucker. I stay here any longer ahm gonn start hurtin folks."
Maw: "Why? What's wrong?"
"Ah got chest flutters and mah head hurts"
Maw: "No, I mean why you wanna leave?"
"These dudes getting registered before me and I was here before 'em."
Maw: "Maybe he got a serious condition'
"It ain't that serious"
Maw: "How you know?"
"Cause ah seen 'em walk in.."
She rants for another minute or so before leaving in faux-disgust.
Fucking genius. It's becoming clear that the desperately poor in Western society are lacking pretty much anything more than the most rudimentary survival skills. But the sense of entitlement required to plonk yourself in a seat and expect the staff to know who you are and what's wrong with you seems a little much.
Anyway, a few uncomfortable minutes and we go through to Triage, where I overhear the nurse asking Pretty Boy about prostitutes and marijuana.
Then we go into a curtained room opposite some guy who looks like he's 5 minutes from death and explain, again, why we're there, where he was treated last time and so forth. The nurse is nice, kinda like Barbra Streisand with a tongue stud. She and the doctor are pretty shocked that the doctor in Pittsburgh gave him antibiotics but told him not to take them unless there was a flare-up. They pull his sterile strip out and decide that, for safety's sake, it's tetanus time.
Then it gets weird. Another doctor comes in, then the ward supervisor, then a woman called Hightower; the Customer Service Officer. I suspect she's ambling for free tickets. Then I overhear Pretty Boy can't be discharged until the International Officer comes by for an interview... So the international guy comes in, takes all his payment information, again. Checks his card and so forth and then Nurse Babs returns with the tetanus jab.
She's already given him 2 painkillers and she starts cleaning the.. insertion spot, for want of a better word.
Suddenly her arm jerks back in this Psycho/Jason Voories motion and Pretty Boy pretty much wet his pants. "No! No, not like that" "Please, no, it will hurt too much!" and backing away from her until he almost falls off the bed. I can see pure fear in his eyes. He's silently begging me to whack this psycho with a drip-stand so he can escape in his bed-gown.
It. Was. Piss-funny.
Nurse Babs is reassuring. She's dealt with whining pussies before, evidently.
"Come on, baby, I won't hurt you, it'll be real quick.' He's squirming and whining and looking at me, fucking terrified. I'm in stitches. I think the old guy across the way even perks up.
So the nurse uses a bit of machismo reverse-psychology and says 'come onnnn, be a man.' (Pretty Boy was born in 1988. eeeeeeeeeep)
He doesn't like that, and with a bit more coaxing he calms down and she jabs him, right to the hilt. He didn't feel a thing.
