Midnight Pass

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Through the partially open door in a treatment room in the E.R. of Sarasota Memorial Hospital, I look out at the cluttered counter of a nursing station.

Small colored sheets of paper are skewered on an upright thin spike. Wire baskets flow over with charts and graphs. A single thin brown folder totters at the edge of the counter, threatening to fall whenever a blue-clad nurse or aide shuffles or hurries by.

On my right in the small, darkened room, the machine next to me gives out a steady, slow series of beeps and a simultaneous series of blips, black dots of sound. The fluorescent lights in the corridor beyond the open door hum. Blips, beeps, and hums. A little night music complete with vocal accompaniment.

“Ron”-a woman’s voice, calm, weary-“glucose was two-five-two.”

A young man in short-sleeved whites wheels a gurney past the cubicle I’m in. Covered by a thin white blanket, an old man with eyes closed pauses just outside the room for an instant and then is pushed out of sight.

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