The ER drums up unusual melodies

About a month ago, I passed out in a cafe and ended up in the emergency room.

Don't worry, I survived.

But what struck me was the symphony of human sights and sounds from other ER beds that basically served as ongoing background music during the several hours I was there.

There was the man across the aisle who made off-putting gurgling sounds that I never quite identified but which prompted another patient to say to someone in her curtained area, "Boy, he must really be sick."

Since we were all within 10 to 15 feet of each other, I'm guessing the man wasn't thrilled to hear the remark.

In the bed next to the gurgling man, separated only by a curtain, a nurse fitted an elderly woman with a catheter. Not a procedure the rest of us necessarily wanted to follow along with, but we had no choice and grimaced as the woman's poignant moans punctuated the event.

Simultaneously, out of my view but sounding as if they were no more than 10 feet away in another direction, a mother and teenage daughter were playing out a drama that occurs every day in America -- a parent getting tough over what she considered her daughter's bad behavior and suspected drug use. And the child angrily challenging her and demanding to be taken home and treated with respect. "Why am I even here?" she yelled at one point. "Why are you doing this to me?"

As the afternoon spilled into the evening, anyone could hear the human experience at its most fleshed-out and uncensored. At one point, the gurgling man, seemingly out of nowhere and without a nurse at his bedside, asked in a loud voice: "Does this look like urine?"

With an IV drip slowly rejuvenating me, I asked a nurse how she kept from going crazy amid the cacophony of moans, arguments and blurted-out questions. She smiled, and I made a mental note to talk to someone in more detail if I ever got out alive.

That day came Friday when I met an ER nurse from another hospital. I relived my experience and she took it all in with a knowing smile, no doubt the result of having spent 18 years in emergency care.

"If you don't laugh, you would cry," she said, as we talked over breakfast. What she meant is that in the midst of the serious business that goes on every day in the emergency room, the human drama inevitably includes comedy. "I should have started writing a book when I started doing this," she said.