To the girl at the front desk..

This past week I unfortunately had to take a friend to the emergency room who was experiencing severe pain and discomfort. We checked into the waiting room, and the young girl at the front desk apologized in advance for the wait we would experience. We thanked her, and proceeded to find a spot to sit on the floor since the waiting room was completely full, and then some.

Over the past year I've had a few accidents of my own and have spent a fair amount of time in hospital/doctors office waiting rooms. If there's one thing I've noticed, it's that these settings bring out the absolute worst behavior in people. Selfishness to the upmost degree.

It seems obvious that everyone is in the hospital waiting room because they're experiencing discomfort, poor health or some sort of injury. Nobody is there for fun. But the behavior I witnessed the other night was unlike anything I had seen before. You could tell just by the looks people were shooting each other back and forth around the room, that everyone assumed their problem was worse than everyone else's. There was actually a verbal confrontation that broke out because a woman who was there with her daughter, after waiting 20 minutes states loudly "This is f****** ridiculous. No one in this G** D*** waiting room is in more pain than you are. We better be next". At this point, we had already been waiting for 2 hours, so as much as this angered me since my friend was doubled over in pain, I bit my tongue. Other people didn't have the same self control.

And the poor girl at the check in desk, I wouldn't have traded places with her for a million dollars. She was getting verbally assaulted and questioned by people waiting, wondering why they weren't receiving care yet.

We unfortunately had to stay the night, and when I left in the morning, she was STILL sitting at the desk. I made a point to go over and say hello to her, and express how terribly I felt that people had been so nasty to her the night before. She wasn't much older than myself. She kind of laughed and commented on how the job has definitely given her thicker skin.

In a year or so, these are the kinds of entry level jobs that some of us may find ourselves in. It's a shame that some people struggle to understand the demand for care sometimes; yes, everyone in the waiting room was obviously there because they needed urgent attention, but there was nothing this girl could do to move them through any quicker. She was doing her job and notified every person that came in that it would be a little longer than normal because they were short staffed. Bottom line, I think she had a great attitude and I commend her for keeping her composure in a situation like that when people much much older than her got in her face and demanded something she couldn't give to them.