A couple of years ago I was in Montreal for the Anarchist Bookfair, pushing a comrade in a wheelchair. The streets in Montreal look like they’ve been shelled by mortars, with huge craters and crevasses everywhere. It was night and it was raining, and what looked like a puddle turned out to be an enormous shell hole into which the wheelchair dropped, hub-deep. I didn’t want to step down into the hole, so I stood on the edge and leaned forward, trying to push the wheelchair out. The wheelchair tipped backwards, I tipped foward, and the handle of the wheelchair came right down on one of the fingers on my left hand with the full weight of the wheelchair plus the occupant.
The nail was torn right off, the bone was shattered, and blood was spraying everywhere. Bits of bone were visible where the flesh had been gouged away. We called 911 and when the first cop showed up and demanded to know what the problem was, I just held up my mangled finger. He turned away quickly and refused to look at me after that. It was that bad.
An ambulance ride later I was at the hospital emergency room. I went through triage, they wrapped my finger in bandages, and sent me to wait in the waiting room. Where I proceeded to sit for the next 12 hours.
Every couple of hours a nurse would call me into the triage room and ask me if I was in a lot of pain. I’d nod and smile, they’d wrap the finger in another layer of bandages (the old ones having soaked through with blood), and they’d send me back to sit in the waiting room again without so much as an aspirin. Now, I’m a stoic and a Buddhist. I don’t react to pain. It’s not that I have an especially high pain tolerance, it’s that I just choose not to react to the pain. As the Gautama Buddha said, “All things perish. All things are grief and pain. All forms are unreal. One who knows and sees this becomes passive in pain; this is the way that leads to purity.” I spent my time meditating as best I could to get away from the rather large amount of pain I was experiencing.
Eventually, at the end of 12 hours, I finally got to see a doctor. I got x-rayed (bone broken in three places). The doctor cleaned the wound, gave me a local anaesthetic, and then sewed it up as best he could (there was a lot of missing flesh) and had an intern split my finger. Now the weird part. The doctor expressed surprise that I had waited as long as I had. He was even mildly chiding, telling me that because I’m diabetic, infections in the hand are serious and that 12 hours was the absolute outside limit before I’d have a guaranteed infection with this type of injury (and then gave me a prescription for an extremely expensive and exotic antibiotic to minimize my risk of infection).
My assumption has always been that doctors and nurses are scientists. When they do triage, I figured they would rationally judge which cases were most serious and needed to be seen immediately, and that howling and crying and carrying on would be at best useless and at worst a dangerous distraction. Here, the message seemed to be that it was my fault I had to wait 12 hours without anaesthetic with bone sticking out of my mangled hand because I hadn’t made a scene in the waiting room.
Is this normal? Was I in the wrong? Am I supposed to throw a fit in the waiting room if I expect normal medical care?
