Waiting room

All along the walls were metal stretchers separated by curtains that were pulled back. The nurses station situated in the middle was full of medical students and residents either sitting and talking or doing paperwork. On the other side of the room there are a few beds with a small mattress atop a board frame. Each bed is full and each each stretcher housed one and sometimes two patents. It is so crowded, people are waiting in line for a bed or stretcher in this emergency room. As I walk in I pass patients holding X-rays waiting to be read, a row of patients sitting in chairs waiting for a bed, some with hands or feet wrapped in bandages soaked in blood. Several look like they had been beat up with swollen faces, some are lying in pools of blood waiting for stitches. I couldn't help but wonder why in the world all the students and residents were standing around with so much that needed to be done! One resident pulls me over to a bed and pulls out the patients CT scan and shows me a large subdural hematoma. This poor kid was just lying there with an NG tube. The resident explained he was waiting on the neurosurgery attending to get here so they could evacuate the bleed. Then he shows me a lady in the line for a bed who's CT shows a ruptured aneurysm. How she was still sitting there I have no idea! We found out that all these patients were waiting for surgery. I was in the surgical ER and the place was so overwhelmed by patients that emergencies were waiting in line for a bed to wait in line for an OR to operate.

I then walk back to the orthopedic section where I met the orthopedist who eagerly shows us how to apply casts. He then turned over the casting to us and only showed us who needed which cast and then left. One lady had almost chopped her thumb off and was there to get it cleaned and hopefully sown back together. As the student cleaned her wound I could tell that part of her thumb had already begun to die and there's no way we could save it. We didn't get to her fast enough and now she would have to have part of her thumb removed. Then these parents bring their son to us on a metal stretcher. He had been in a motorcycle accident and his arm looked like it had 2 wrists. It was an open fracture so we had to clean the area very well and then we casted it so he could be admitted to the hospital for antibiotics for a few days before doing the surgery to fix it. He laid in the hallway after we finished for several hours with his family standing there, until they were told where they could take him next. No nurse or hospital staff is wasted moving patients. The families or friends must move them from line to line or room to room. I often saw people alone on stretchers in the hall waiting for someone to move them. 

We casted just about everything. Apparently the only resource here is plaster. Very few ace wraps, and no knee sleeves or ankle braces. We casted ankle sprains, knee sprains, and then of course the broken ones too. I watched the ortho resident pop a displaced tibial fracture back into place, and then another resident try and fail to re-approximate a displaced distal radial and humerus fracture. It's just a different world here. Use what you have to help people as fast as you can and get them out so we can keep the line moving. One guy couldn't afford the material to fix his leg (patients must go buy part of the materials because the hospital runs out quickly) so we just sent him home so we could reuse that bed. And if a patient needed stitches, it was done as fast as possible with as few stitches as possible. Forget all the techniques to minimize scarring. That is a luxury. 

If you walk out of the ER you will find a long hallway outside of X-ray which has been overflowing with people each time I have walked it. Everyone is waiting for an X-ray to go wait to have it read . . . It seems so wrong. And yet has I have sat and considered these things each day I've noticed they really are doing the best they can. There's just too many people for so few resources. And it works, it's not the best but it gets the job done and helps the most people possible given the conditions. 

But I can't help but be so thankful for the way God made our bodies! He made us perfect and then sin wrecked havoc and now bones get broken and motorcycles wreck. But His grace is so great that He still gives us a way to heal. I mean all we have to do is line up the broken bone together and it repairs itself! We just have to hold the skin closed long enough for it to replace the hole with new skin! Grace is in the details we often look over. How much harder it would be if our bones didn't heal or our skin was left with a hole! 

You know it even reminds me of us as the body of Christ. We have been healed but the world around us is so broken and is bleeding and waiting to find the right 'cure' for their ailments. We have the Way to bring healing! The Only Way! And it doesn't have to be perfect on our part! We don't have to have the perfect words or illustration. Yes God asks us to be faithful and be there to apply a 'cast' or a 'stitch' but those things don't heal, God does! And yes, the harvest is plentiful but the workers are so few!    Who is it that God has placed around you or me that is waiting to be healed?