The Homeless Woman

The chest pain area of the emergency room at RMH, where I spent Friday night, is away from the rest of the ER. It is quieter there.

The rooms are single beds, very small, divided from the hall with a curtain.

I could hear everything said in the two rooms across from me as if I were standing right next to the bed. I couldn't hear anything said in the room beside me.

In one of the rooms across from me was a woman who was homeless. I know this because sometime before 8 p.m. Friday night the nurse helped her call her sister.

She told her sister that she was the ER with chest pains; she has spent the previous night in one of Roanoke's homeless shelters. She had lived in an apartment but her boyfriend beat her and she left. She had recently been released from a rehab unit somewhere.

I heard her tell her sister this story and I felt very sorry for her.

She needed somewhere to go. It would be late when she received her test results, too late to go to the homeless shelter because it closes it doors at a certain hour, apparently.

Her sister would not come get her. It appeared to me that the nursing staff took it upon themselves to keep her test results in limbo somewhere so that a social worker could see her early the next morning. I am not sure that is the case but the nurses did not want to let the woman go out into the very cold night with no place to go.

During the night the woman woke up upset. She wanted to leave. The nurse told her she could go if she wanted but reminded her that she had no shelter.

After much discussion, some of which included a story about a dream wherein the Lord told the homeless woman she should never go back to the homeless shelter, the nurse gave the woman a sleeping pill and she went back to sleep.

The next morning the social worker was next to useless; she did not offer the woman hardly any assistance from what I heard. The hospital or Social Services gave her a voucher for a ride in a cab to a homeless shelter.

Her test results showed she did have some kind of heart problem. Unlike me, she really did need to be tested since they actually found something. She needed some kind of medication that she told the nurse she could not afford.

All I could think was "there but for the grace of God." I have no idea of this woman's particular circumstances. I know there will be people who will judge her as having made poor choices and perhaps brought this upon herself; my impression was she was just one of those unfortunate souls who do not have much intelligence or common sense but I don't know that to be true. People will tell me that the money I expect to be paying out because of what my insurance won't cover will go to pay for this woman's care.

I know that. I still feel sorry for her. There has to be a better way to take care of people who are down on their luck, whether through poor choices, low IQ or whatever. Maybe this woman's family has some responsibility for her - I know if my brother called me, whatever the time of day, and told me he was in the hospital and needed me, I would drop everything I was doing and go to him. I would do the same thing for pretty much everyone, friends and family alike. But that is just me.

In any event, this woman's circumstances has preyed on my mind for a few days.

We are a mighty nation. Why can't we take care of those among us who really need it? What are we doing wrong?