I’m an ER nurse. Seventeen years. Nights. People imagine the ER as chaos, and it is, but the part nobody sees is the waiting room at 3 AM, where the not-quite-emergencies sit for hours, and I want to tell you about chair fourteen.
Six years ago I noticed the same elderly man in the waiting room three Fridays in a row, always chair fourteen, always a complaint that evaporated by the time triage got to him, chest tight, then fine, dizzy, then fine.