Not To Be Taken Personally:

The bare trees. The bleak sky. The slush in the streets.

The bland professional smiles. The unwarranted familiarity, all things casual to the exclusion of dignity, as if emergency has made you a child again, everybody's child; and a slightly dim child, at that.

The bare-assed johnny, still scratchy after innumerable launderings. The linoleous pastel tedium. The ghosts of a half-dozen unpleasant odors, faint and miasmic at the threshold of perception.

The intermittent sounds of violent retching from the alcoved room before you. The continual sound of agonized moaning from the alcoved room behind you. The thick liquid coughing from behind the flowered curtain beside you.

The awkwardness of the narrow bed where you sit, hands dumbly at your sides, longing yearning begging to be made useful.

The single-player Pong soundtrack of cardiac telemetry.

The silence: constant din, but heavy with the waiting for answers, a silence like the silence of God.

Don't take it personally.