Hospital emergency waiting rooms – particularly in children’s hospitals – are a level of hell, staffed by angels.
When I arrived at the Royal Children’s hospital on Thursday with my mysteriously unwell and deteriorating child, there was just one person staffing the front desk, which seemed inadequate for the flow of misery trickling in the door: inconsolable screaming babies, listless toddlers and mums with stress-etched faces and work laptops on their knees.
I presented a letter from our GP and settled in for a long wait, but we were called through quickly – so quickly it worried me – for the first of many rounds of poking, prodding, reflex-testing and questions. The triage nurse seemed not to hear the distressed child wailing in the next room, focusing only on us.
He sent us through to the main waiting room, more crowded than the first – and, despite the RCH’s brilliant child-distracting multi-story tropical fish tank, filled with a sense of apprehension. No one made eye contact.
This will take a while, I thought, but as soon as I stood up to stretch my legs, a triage doctor........