A Fat Lip, Forgetting and Factoring

A Fat Lip, Forgetting and Factoring

An oppressive July heat weighed on me as I got off work that Wednesday night. I locked the office door and looked at my watch. 

8:10 

This didn’t feel like California. The unnatural tropic humidity made the air unbearable.


Well, I can go home and toss and turn all night in this hot, humid weather with no A/C, or I can do what the doctor has been nagging me to do and go spend the night at the ER of the county hospital.  That was the only way we could get to see the doctor who could definitively say if what was plaguing me was Multiple Sclerosis or not.


I stood there a minute and felt the heat just sap the energy right out of me. Sweat trickled down my back and I felt as though I every last bit of energy was sucked out of me and I now  wore a lead suit. My doctor had told me the only way I was going to get to see the neurologist I needed to would be to go down to L. A. County/USC Medical center and camp out until I was seen.


And so I got in the car, braced myself and headed west to the County/USC Hospital.


Trying to find the ER proved quite a feat


From the 60 freeway, I headed north on State Street. At the end of State Street loomed the hospital on a hill behind a fenced-off area bearing large orange signs that read Construction Ahead – Hardhat Zone. 

All kinds of mixed emotions flooded me.  It had been years since I taught my first three years at White Memorial School just over the freeway. But I'd once driven these streets on a daily basis. And yet, with all the construction, nothing looked familiar now.

Off to the right, a temporary sign dangled sideways from the chain link fence. It read Emergency Room – Emergencia, and had an arrow pointing westward. 

Actually, as it dangled there, it pointed off to the west, but had it still been in place, it would have pointed straight ahead, north. The driver behind me honked impatiently.


I cautiously drove across the rutted road, under an arched entry and onto the hospital grounds. The narrow road snaked up a hill, lined on both sides with temporary wooden walls and chain link fences, and was littered with empty concrete bags and discarded bottles and paper cups and other unidentifiable refuse.


Chugging up the small hill, my car began to overheat, the needle steadily moving closer to red.


“Not NOW!” I muttered, and instinctively reached down to turn on the heater, hoping to draw some of the hot air off the engine. That’s all I needed. My poor little Saturn with its 150,000 miles was on its last leg. It was bad enough already melting with the muggy, hot night air.                    


The heat blew into the car like a blast from a furnace, and sweat began to roll down my face and back. My feet began to hurt as my ankles swelled from the heat.

I drove slowly up the road, looking for anything that indicated the ER, but saw nothing. A short, dirty road led off to the left, but dead-ended in a construction site. At the top of the hill I passed a large well-lit bus stop behind which extremely wide steps led up to the dirty, outdated building. Then the road wound quickly down the other side of the hill and emptied through yet another gate back onto the city streets.


I figured I must have missed it, and doubled back. Through the gate, up over the hill, past the bus stop, down the other side, and back out onto city streets. No sign of the ER other than the dangling sign I had first noticed. The heat became unbearable and the needle on the gauge inched into the red zone.


Frustrated, I tried a third time, my scrubs shirt beginning to stick to me but to no avail. This time, I turned right when the gates dumped me back out on the streets. A little way up the street on the right the road widened, revealing a small guard station and a sign that read, Emergency Room – Emergencia!


But as I tried to turn in, a security guard stepped out and stopped me from going any further. I slipped the car into neutral, revving the engine in hopes it would help keep the radiator from boiling over, and hung my head out the window to ask for help. The guard’s broken English and heavy Filipino accent made it hard for me to understand what he said. The heat in the car became intense as I idled there, trying to communicate with him. I finally understood enough to know I needed to get back on the road and drive until I reached Lot 12 (wherever that was) and enter through the back of the hospital. Only patients who could not walk were allowed in the Emergency entrance.


A few more minutes in this incredible heat and I wouldn’t be able to walk! But I cautiously backed the car out of the blind drive and headed up the road into darkness with trepidation.

Once I found Lot 12, how would I know how to get to the back entrance to the hospital? Please, God, let there be signs!


I found Lot 12 easily enough about a hundred yards up the road, and pulled into the parking structure. A shiver ran down my spine in spite of the horrific heat that had now built up inside the car. My mind went back to my friend, Vivian whose life had ended so abruptly just years earlier when she was murdered in a hospital parking log. It seemed like only yesterday as I struggled with that old familiar fear. What if someone lay in wait in this very parking lot?


I decided I would park near the elevator or the exit sign for a quick escape should I need one. But I could not find a space. The slots closest to the open end of the structure were all designated for handicapped parking. 


I glanced at my watch. 9:25. This late at night, the parking structure was still very full. I didn’t want to go to another level for fear of not remembering where I had parked my car once I got back.

I drove around a corner and the full length of the lot before finding a small space at the far end, near an exit door. I backed in so as not to expose my back to anyone, and eagerly began to get out of the overheated car. But as I stepped out the oppressive humidity and the overpowering smell of stale urine overwhelmed me, and I almost gagged. I can do this! I’ve come this far. I can do it! Too late to chicken out now, Liz.


I walked swiftly to pull open the “Exit” door, only to find it led down into a pitch black stairway. Quickly, I pushed it shut and started out as fast as my numb legs would carry me toward the open side at the farthest end of the lot.


If the handicapped parking was there, it must be the closest to the hospital, I reasoned.

Crossing an aerial walkway and making a sharp turn to the left, I followed the hedge-lined sidewalk, left again, toward light spilling from a far-off, open door. 

My legs felt heavy and weak after the heat in the car, and I stumbled twice before reaching the door.


With a sigh of relief, I stepped through the doorway into a brightly-lit, tiled hallway. 


Just inside the open door stood a security station with a bored-looking guard and a metal detector.


“I am not sure I am in the right place,” I confessed to the friendly-looking man standing duty there. “I’m… I’m trying to find the emergency room…” I stuttered. “Is this the way….? I am really not sure where I am.”


“Do you know where you are, ma’am?” he asked, looking at me dubiously.


I looked back at him, not understanding. Wasn’t that what I had just asked him?


“I hope I’m at the entrance to the ER,” I said, again feeling strangely out of place and much like a small child who wandered out of her yard and become lost.


“Ma’am, I think you are in the wrong place. This is the county hospital. Maybe you are looking for White Memorial Hospital. It’s just across the freeway.”


“No. I am in the right hospital,” I assured him.


“Well, who are you here to see?” he asked, looking skeptically from my pristine white pants and colorful scrubs shirt to my neatly done-up hair and earrings.


“I am the patient,” I said. “I am trying to find the emergency room,” I reiterated. “I was sent here…,” my voice beginning to quaver.


He gave me a puzzled look, then still looking skeptical said, “Well, if you want the ER, this is the right place.


I emptied my pockets onto the tray and started preparing to proceed through the metal detector. I asked him how to get to the ER, beginning to feel claustrophobic as I looked down the long corridor shrinking into the distance.


“Just follow this yellow line here,” he said, pointing to the floor, “and when you get way down the hall and come to a yellow square, turn right. Follow the yellow line through the doors, and it will take you to the ER,” he said, still looking puzzled.


Follow the yellow brick road… 

Everything seemed so surreal I almost expected to come across the Tin Man. 

I started off down the long hallway, looking back over my shoulder once in a while to be sure I could still see the entrance, in case I decided to chicken out.


I reached the square on the floor and stopped, taking one last look down the hall I’d just traversed. This was the last chance. I could still turn back. I could see the open door. 

After several seconds, I turned right heading down the second hall. Eventually I pushed through heavy swinging doors that looked like they belonged on a loading dock, and entered the ER.


When I signed in on a clipboard at the counter, an energetic Hispanic woman about my age asked to see my hospital ID card. I told her I didn’t have a card; that I’d never been there before.


“Oh. Okay. Don’t worry. Let me just give you a name tag,” she said, reaching under the counter with one hand, and turning the clipboard around with the other. “Rosas?!” she asked in surprise, looking at me over the rim of her reading glasses.


“Yes, I know. I don’t look like it, but that’s me. …It’s the only thing my husband left me.” I’d long since tired of trying to explain my Spanish last name to strangers, and the old joke tasted stale.


“It’s okay, honey,” she said, “My last name is Hardy! Not exactly the nice Hispanic name my mom wanted for me. I guess you can’t tell a book by its cover, huh?”


She had pulled a plain manila tag from under the counter and wrote ROSAS in big black letters and reached out for my right hand. 

As she tied the tag around my wrist, I felt a little queezy. 

Well, at least they aren’t tying it around your toe and sticking you in a refrigerator! I laughed at myself.


She sent me to sit and wait for my name to be called. The first hour, I was seated in “triage” – a hallway with aluminum chairs lined against the wall. I took the only empty chair, next to a massive, tattooed and scarred, bald-headed man in handcuffs and manacles.

He was so jittery he could not sit still and kept rubbing and bumping up against me as he jiggled. 

He eventually fell asleep, leaning against me, his head on my shoulder, and snored softly until the officer who brought him in nudged him and made him lean the other way.


Then another policeman ushered in three inmates from the county jail (also in chains and manacles.) Two left red, spotted trails of blood from bandaged wounds, and the third rolling up in a wheelchair, began slinging about a gangrenous leg and laughing at the response of those nearby.


Shortly after that, the woman at the counter called my name and sent me down a maze of hallways, through countless foreboding-looking doors to the "ambulatory ER", which happened to be right next to the outpatient psyche ward. There I found a whole other class of clientele! Most people would not make eye contact with anyone else and carried on conversations with invisible people.


In the center of the room, several rows of plastic chairs faced a TV mounted near the ceiling. Another row of chairs lined the right wall and half of the back wall. I chose one of those chairs, where I could see everything around me, and pulled out the book I’d bought earlier at the thrift store across the street from the office.


Each time someone new came into the room, I would look up, absent-mindedly, to take stock before turning back to the same page I’d already read several times.


After a few hours, I looked up to notice a black man who had entered the waiting area. 

He carried a drink in one hand and a bag of potato chips in another and sported the fattest lip I had ever seen. It was about five times the normal size! 

Oh, the poor guy! That has got to HURT! I thought, unconsciously smiling in sympathy.


He caught my glance and lit up as he saw me smile. He walked over, sitting two chairs away from me and said hello.

I smiled and nodded. After we exchanged pleasantries, he ignored my efforts to delve back into the book I had been trying to read.


“What are you reading?” he asked.


“Oh, some book I bought today at the thrift store,” I said. “She’s not a very good story-teller.” I smiled at him and turned back to my book.


“What are you doing here?” he asked.


“I’m sick. Like everybody else,” I said, looking up once more.


“Don’t look at this lip,” he said, covering it in embarrassment. “It looks really ugly!”

“That’s okay. This too shall pass. It won’t look like that forever. Once they get you fixed up, you’ll look good as new,” I promised him.


“I like you. You’re nice.”


He furrowed his brow and cocked his head to one side trying to figure something out. 

I stuck out like a sore thumb, the only white person in the room, and the only one whose clean scrubs looked like they should have been on the other side of the locked doors and bullet-proof glass!


It soon became clear he just needed someone to listen. 

He said his name was Melton as I looked up for the umpteenth time from my book. He was 37 and going back to school after two decades of drug abuse and homelessness.


“Wow!” I said, closing my book and laying it down on the chair next to me. “That’s fantastic. I am so proud of you!”

His eyes suddenly filled with tears and he looked deep into my eyes. 

“You know…” he said slowly. “I don’t think anyone has ever said that to me before… Ever.... You know… about being proud.” 

He blinked back the tears, smiled, and then winced, covering his swollen lip again with his hand.


I looked at this man, almost forty years old, and saw a young, lonely boy. I wanted to hug him and make it all better. 

But all I could do was listen. So I listened until he was all talked out.

He told me of his lonely, fractured childhood with a drunken mother and a molesting step-father. He told me about being thrown out on his own at a young age. He had wasted two decades on drugs and alcohol. 

But he'd wandered into a church six months ago, and his life had changed.

“With God’s help, I am gonna make the rest of my life count,” he said. 

“I got myself clean…. I got me a car… Now I just need to get me a job. But I can’t do that til I get this ugly ‘ol lip fixed. Ain’t nobody gonna hire someone with a ugly old lip like this!


“I don’t know why I am telling you all this. It’s just that your smile was so nice,” he said, now looking sheepish.


“Well, Melton,” I said, “I am so sorry your life has been so tough. But I want you to know that those sad things are just bad things that happened to you. And even though they hurt very badly, they do not define who you are. They are just things that happened to you. And you are proving that to yourself by starting over. That takes a lot of courage. I expect to see good things from you, Melton.”


He sat a little taller then and smiled sheepishly, again pressing his hand to his fat lip.

“… um... let me ask you…” he said suddenly, his eyes darting left and right and then back to me. “You look like a professional person and all…. I mean, you look like you know stuff…. Do you know factors…?” he asked in a whisper. 

“You see, I’m having a quiz in the morning in my math class. And it’s gonna be on factors.

"And I don’t really get it. I mean I kinda get it… But not all the way. You know what I mean?” he asked, eagerly sitting on the edge of his seat.


He looked up at me with those big brown eyes and I could not help but smile. His child-like smile radiated warmth and eagerness.

“Well, Melton, this is your lucky day,” I smiled. “Not only is someone proud of you, but it just so happens that I used to teach 5th grade. So I know all about factors. And you are going to ace 
that quiz!”



I reached down and plucked a discarded newspaper from the floor and laid it on the chair between us. We started with an easy number. Twenty-five. He wrote the number on the newsprint and drew his “tree” below it, then paused for a minute. He looked up at me for a clue.


“Well, what number can go into 25?” I asked, meeting his stare.
“Five! I know this one! Five times five!” And he factored it out.
I gave him another number and another one after that. Soon we had run out of newspaper and he crossed the room to grab another discarded one from the floor. “Give me another number,” he begged. And I did.


For the next two hours this boy in a man's body factored numbers on every inch of discarded newsprint we could find!


I told him I was so proud of him and talked with him until just before sunrise, when they finally called me back into the bowels of the ER for an exam.


I was saddened when I came back out and he was gone. I won’t bore you with the rest of the story, but I spent the rest of the day at the county hospital and didn’t get any answers. I left very tired and very discouraged.


I stumbled back to the elevator, down the hallway, and out through the smelly parking structure to my car on my numb, wooden legs. But I thought to myself that my night had not been wasted. I had met Melton and had been touched somewhere deep inside. I came away very tired and very hot and sweaty, without any answers to my medical mysteries, but feeling blessed nevertheless.


You know, I just may or may not have an incurable disease and no insurance to even treat it, but I know I am still a very fortunate gal. Just remind me next time I whine that there are a lot of folks out there in the county ER who would give anything to trade places with me!




Liz Carson Rosas
 12 June 2009




Matthew 25:40 "The King will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.'




John 1:16 From the fullness of his grace we have all received one blessing after another.