It should've been quick, anyway.
We took him to a relatively new medical center not far from home, a place we've really come to like. (With two boys we've logged enough time in ERs to have a preference.) This time, however, the staff was uncharacteristically inattentive, borderline aloof, mostly invisible.
After almost an hour of waiting, a registration clerk (the person who collects payment before treatment can begin) entered our exam room. When we asked her if the ER was particularly busy today she said no, explaining (with a straight face) that the computer systems were down and that the staff had to do all of their reports manually.
Well, you learn something every day -- I mean, who knew that handwriting could interfere with practicing emergency medicine?
The clerk must've sensed our disbelief, because shortly after she left we got a visit from a tech who performed an EKG on the spawn -- a procedure that's patently unnecessary when diagnosing a possible concussion (or worse). Clearly its only purpose was to appease us.
It didn't.
Two hours into our three-hour stay, I was tired of watching TV and intolerably annoyed with what I saw on the dry-erase board mounted to the wall. Instead of displaying today's date, along with the names of a nurse and aide on duty, the date hadn't been changed since last Friday and the names (like the ER staff, by and large) were absent.
I walked over to the board, uncapped a marker, filled-in the blanks and left it that way.
