The Crying Room

NYC's hottest club is the ER on a Saturday night.

I’ve never been admitted to a hospital before. I’ve never even broken a bone before. Well, that’s half a lie — in gym class when I was 15, someone said heads up! and I put my hand up to intercept a basketball’s enthusiastic trajectory towards my head, as it hit my right pinky tip at a perfectly perpendicular angle so that it crushed the finger downwards into itself, into a comically zig-zag shape. No one believed me it was broken until two or three days later when it continuously swelled and turned green, so by the time I was taken to get it x-rayed, it had half-healed and was downgraded to a fracture. My right pinky is still shaped a bit like a lazy S. (A semi-important contextual feature: I wasn’t even playing basketball; I was sitting out.)

Alas, I resentfully digress. Going to a hospital in NYC seems annoying for many reasons — most of which is they’re all on the east side of Manhattan. (Well, there are some in Brooklyn, but I’ve heard that even NYPD won’t go to Woodhull, and Elmhurst is also a hellish 1-star experience for all the reasons that medical facilities are suffering.)

Anyway, one never imagines that the first time they visit the ER is because they got something in their eye after 4 pm on a Saturday, at which time all ophthalmologist offices are shut for the day. You do NOT want to get an errant piece of sky shrapnel in your eye after 4 pm on a weekend, let me tell you.