Relationship: Spouse.
Secondary contact: a phone number with a 303 area code I didn’t recognize.
Dependents listed: one.
My name was not on that screen. Anywhere.And the thing that took the last of my legs out from under me wasn’t the word spouse. It was the field underneath it, the one that said the information had last been updated.
Not that night. Not by a paramedic. Not by a panicking woman in a waiting room.
Fourteen months earlier. By the patient.
My husband had sat down at some point, in some office, in a chair, with no emergency and nobody rushing him, and typed another woman’s name into the field where mine had been.
My fingers went numb. That’s a real thing, it turns out. Both hands, from the second knuckle out.
Through the Glass I Saw a Blonde Woman Holding a Little Girl’s Hand, and Then I Saw What Was Around Her NeckThe trauma bays on that floor have a corridor with a long window into the hallway, and from where I was standing I could see about forty feet of it.
She was standing beside a bed with her back three-quarters to me.
