Today marked my first day at my new job. I was working in the Emergency Registration Department at St. Jude’s Hospital. Previously I had worked at a restaurant, porn store and Juvenile Detention Facility so this was really the most normal group of people I had ever worked with.
My job was quite simple. Any moron could do it. Patients were placed in rooms in the Emergency Room. We had 60 treatment rooms and a waiting room constantly full of patients waiting for their turn to be poked and prodded by our ready and willing staff of doctors and nurses. Once the patient had a room waiting for them, they would be called into the back area and their assigned nurse would come to see them. Next was my turn. It took awhile for the Doctors to actually go and see the patients mostly because they were frequently out smoking or tossing a football around the Doctors lounge.
I would go to see the patient and ask my standard questions:
What’s your name?
Date of Birth?
Address?
Emergency Contact?
Do you have any insurance?
(At our hospital the answer was usually no)
After this litany of information is recited and I seem interested enough to the patient that they thought I cared and wrote down what they said I would go out to my desk and copy their ID and insurance card. I return to the room, give back the insurance cards and ask the patient to sign consent to be treated, sneakily this is also the form that includes the billing information also. Most people don’t realize that they are also agreeing to pay what is almost always an extremely hefty bill.
Next I go and arrange the paper work and my work is quickly done.
My first few weeks were going to consist almost solely of being trained. My immediate supervisor is named Mary and she is a few years older than I am, almost 27, and currently going through a nasty divorce with her husband. She is going to be training me, and that means that she is talking on the phone with her new boyfriend while I register all of the patients and ask her questions when I come across problems.
I didn’t really mind doing all of the work. It was interesting, this was an ER with a trauma service so I got to see all sorts of interesting injuries especially because I worked the 2:30pm - 1am shift. It was just late enough to catch a lot of the weirdo but early enough where I could still sort of wake up in the morning if I had to.
I was sitting at my desk in the corner of the ER when I saw a young and cute guy in a security guard uniform walking my way. He came over and Mary promptly hung up the phone. Her eyes lit up and he smiled a huge smile at her. She introduced me to him and told me his name was Mike, but everybody called him Mikey. I was immediately interested. I had just gotten out of a really bad relationship with my ex and I was looking for a nice, un crazy man.