9th
Sometime I don't miss dealing with Baltimore.
like today, the most dramiatic event was playing car detective in Booonsboro for Lucia— strolling around town, asking in the neighborhood auto parts store who owns the garage and why isn’t it open yet on a monday afternoon, getting answers to both questions, and being pretty sure no was gonna shiv me or throw a rock through the window at any time.
My friend Mike’s sister, Elizabeth, told me this story and it’s equal parts heartbreaking and hilarious.
Elizabeth works as a nurse in the Emergency Room at Johns Hopkins’ hospital where she, unfortunately, treats a lot more gun shots and stabbings and such than she’d like. Moreover, a large percentage of the people who come into the ER are doped up on one drug or another and can be downright scary at times. For these reasons, she explained, when relatively healthy children appear (maybe they have an ear infection, for example) it’s usually a welcome change from the otherwise tragic routine.
On a recent weekend, Elizabeth said a woman brought her two year old son in because he was complaining of pain in his stomach (he’d ended up having to have something - I can’t remember… his appendix?? - removed) and wouldn’t stop crying. Here’s the heartbreaking part. After the little boy was admitted, the mother left the hospital and told them to “call her when he was done”, leaving the boy to have his surgery and recover (having to stay over night) without any family in the hospital, completely alone. At two years old. Elizabeth said he was terrified.
Anyway.
Before this display of exemplary parenting, when the mother and son had first been taken back to the examination rooms, Elizabeth was given his admittance forms and, reading the name written on the top, said to the young boy “Hi Wayne. You’re not feeling good huh?”
“That’s not his name,” the boy’s mother said.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Elizabeth replied, looking back at the clip board to confirm what she’d read before. It said “Wayne”. “What’s your name then?” she asked him.
“It’s DeWayne,” the mother answered.
“Oh OK. No problem,” Elizabeth said. “Someone must have made a mistake. It just says ‘Wayne’ here.”
“W-A-Y-N-E?” the mother asked.
Elizabeth nodded.
“No that’s his name,” she said, “DeWayne. But the ‘De’ is invisible.”
“Invisible?” Elizabeth asked.
“Yeah,” she answered,”that’s what I said. DeWayne, but the ‘De’ is invisible.”
“I see,” Elizabeth responded.
