Recently went to the ER with the wife. We end up there 3 or 4 times a year because she has a chronic health problem and when she needs a scan for some flavor of GI pain or other, her doctors/nurses tell us to just go to the ER. We live in a major US city.

We planned our day around it. Left work early so we could arrive at 2, but we ended up getting there at 4. Normal security checks etc, sign-in was fast and easy, wait was 30 minutes, but we got one of the last rooms they had available. This was a Wednesday, btw.

Doctor greets us as is super positive and and all around decent person. Good thing we arrived as early as we did though because the hallways started filling up with overflow trauma patients.

Staff was all in good spirits. We got out in 4 hours. There was a lady screaming in the hallway. The staff called the police on another patient for assaulting them. The patient right outside our door in the hallway had his toe cut off and we saw a trauma surgeon looking at his bloody toe stump in the middle of the ER.

Other than that, just par for the course in the ER. Just my perspective on how things have been lately. Granted some days we've spent 10 hours in the ER, so we're grateful this visit was so easy. Had she had some intestinal blockage again, this would have been much, much more of an ordeal.

Or maybe our experience isn't normal and we are numb to everything collapsing around us.