I’m a big fan of snacking and have always advocated that people do it wherever necessary. You should keep something that is crunchy and satisfying near your desk and in your car to beat back the hunger that can hit you when you least expect it. After this weekend, though, I’ve decided there is at least one exception.
I unfortunately ended up with a loved one in the emergency room Sunday. Everything turned out to be fine and they thankfully had no serious issue. That probably wasn’t the case with the many, many other people on hand, however. There was one lady sitting to our left, we’ll call her Ms. Little, that alternated between sleeping and putting her head between her legs and groaning the groan of a sick person. A person to our right was very clearly in serious pain. And then there were two people sitting across from us eating Funyuns and drinking Sprite.
Now, there aren’t vending machines in an emergency room to my knowledge, at least none I’ve ever seen.
“Hey, I know we’re in the middle of some serious medical trauma, but you want a honeybun?” is not a question that has ever been asked.
One of the people appeared to have a serious nose wound of some kind, but they happily sat there eating their crunchy, faux onion ring snacks out of a bag with a big smile on their face. Since there is no means of getting snacks once you arrive at the emergency room, I can only assume they brought them with them.
“AHHHHH!!!!!! The neighbor’s pet dingo just bit my nose off.”
“Oh gosh, we’ve got to get you to the emergency room. Get your glasses…well, they won’t stay on since you no longer have a nose so scratch that. We will need some bandages to stop the bleeding, we need to have your insurance card and make sure we have something to nibble on while we wait.”
So that is weird enough by itself, but you also have to think about eating while you are in an emergency room. As the two continued to feed their hunger a situation was developing to our left with Ms. Little. I heard a hospital employee say, “Here’s you a bag” as the poor lady threw up. Now, this was not a discreet, passive little incident by any means. Ms. Little was apparently very sick and her un-eating came with lots of sound effects. So this is what I was hearing…
How do you keep casually putting food in your mouth while someone a few feet away executes what I call the chunky style yawn? It made me not want to eat anything for a while and certainly not at that minute. Not these two, though.
“There she blows again (crunch, crunch),” they may as well have said.
Well, that is just two super odd individuals right there, I thought. I just happened to be sharing space with the only two people in the state that would happily gorge themselves while somebody yakked in a bag in front of them. I was wrong, though, because another lady, one sitting even closer to the action than the two others, pulled out a bag of beef jerky and started gnawing on it. The hospital staffer came and fetched that first barf bag, walked right by the Funyun Fan Club with it and brought Ms. Little another one. As she commenced to fill it up, they kept eating and the other lady casually pulled another piece of jerky out and started working on it.
So, maybe I’m the weird one? I mean, as many people were eating in the room as were not and no one else seemed to notice, care or be bothered by what was going on. The real question is whether these folks keep on eating once a doctor is seeing them. Can you eat Funyuns while your nose is being stitched back on?
Once we got back to an area (not really a room) we’d been waiting for a very long time. I was not the patient in this case, but someone very politely offered me a drink.
“Would you like some apple juice?”
The scenes I’d just taken in replayed in my head very quickly. I’d not had anything to eat or drink in a while, but…
“No ma’am, I don’t care for anything right now. Thank you.”
