Automatic Sliding Glass Doors Whoosh Open - 1572 Words

Two automatic sliding glass doors whoosh open. You walk in, nervous and scared faces surround you. A stale bleach smell fills your lungs. Men and women, young and old dressed in varying shades of blue scrubs file paperwork, pound on a keyboard, or chat with patients families. You are in the Desert Springs emergency room in Las Vegas, Nevada. People say that it takes a special kind of person to work in the emergency room. Someone who can handle the most unsightly wounds, someone who can forget everything they’ve seen as soon as they walk out the door of the hospital, someone who works well under pressure, and someone who can put up a front to handle patients families even in worst case scenarios. But who really are these employees? Is it as easy as they make it seem to forget about a patient who you just witnessed take their last breaths or tell a crying mother that their son may never walk again? The emergency room was slow and sleepy, a patient limps in while others waited fo r bandages or medication for an allergic reaction. The nurses sat casually at a desk labeled â€Å"Emergency Room Check In†. Almost as though they had their own language, they barked orders at each other. â€Å"22 needs to be cleaned now† and â€Å"When was the last time alpha’s heart rate was taken in 4?† I approach a young female nurse who asked that I don’t use her name, we’ll call her Pixie because of her whimsical ear length hair style. I ask Pixie, â€Å"Is there some sort of unspoken ER language?† She looks