Back in the ER

Threre are places where fear starts at the door. Emergency Room is a mixed bag . I knew that the antibiotics I needed weren't emergency , more like urgent , but the nurse I was dealing with said to do it then , at 10 30 , now 11, so I wouldn't stagger my dose off schedule so much . My pic line was blocked, needed clearing , which the ER could do. So in we went, very tired, sleepy. 

   It was apparently a quiet though busy night , and I lay on a gurney in the hall, tended to well, by nice folks . I dozed . I had not been there since the accident that started the whole thing . And I'd been for a kidney stone , and I think some other stuff, long ago. I knew was going to be ok, mostly , I and we cleared out my clog with a three way blood gizmo. Pretty slick. And I lay there and dozed, and half dreamed.

   I remembered all the times I hadn't been there. But they looked the same as if I had. When the ceiling clouded as my vision dimmed . From someone else's stretcher, I saw the line of lights , a highway down the hall to what might be the last vision ever. Or the time I didn't lay there , next to a partner , hurt too, but not so badly, so they had to wheel me away while partner tried to express that there was a simple way to make it all so much better. But I saw the words fail in his mouth as I was wheeled away. And the idea die in his mind with his hand stretched over .  These weren't the times I'd been here. These were someone else memories, nudging their way past my closing eyes as I lay and drifted in and out, with the fluids flowing in my arm and the slow careful cleaners walked and walked, and all the blue scrubbed night shift workers walked with careful focus not to be distracted, so much desired need on every side. 

     But I slept and waked and dreamed and remembered , all those times I hadn't been there. And never could find , that time I really had.