Not just for only children! Info, stories and life experiences for anyone who feels like they didn't get the How-To brochure on life! Host Tracy Wallace, who has been a business owner, a successful fundraiser, a stand-up comedian, a caregiver and an animal lover, shares stories from the front lines of adulting to help others in this journey called life. She does this while finding the humor in the all situations.
A hospital hallway is not where anyone expects to spend their day, yet for so many families it has become the new waiting room, the new patient room, and the new backdrop for life-changing news. I’m Tracy Wallace, and I’m sharing a raw snippet from a difficult week as my husband lands back in the hospital, forcing us to make fast decisions, push for the right specialist, and walk straight back into the emotional grind of the emergency room.
You’ll hear what it’s like when an ER experience is “positive” on paper with quick tests, responsive staff, real movement and still feels brutal because there’s no privacy, no quiet, and no real space to exist. We talk about how emergency care has shifted since COVID, why hallways are now packed with patients, and how caregiver stress builds minute by minute when you’re stuck in a chair as gurneys and carts stream past.
The tension peaks when they move us near the trauma bays, just feet from ambulance arrivals. While a medical team tries to explain my husband’s case, a child comes through injured, and the sound of that fear changes everything. I share the image I can’t shake: a mother holding her toddler, trying to shield her from the chaos, and what that moment taught me about love, protection, and the hidden emotional labor of caregiving.
If you’ve ever searched for answers on navigating adulthood, supporting a spouse through illness, coping with hospital anxiety, or surviving an ER visit without falling apart, this conversation will feel painfully familiar. Subscribe to Only Child Diaries, share this with someone who needs it, and leave a review so more listeners can find us.
Welcome to the Only Child Diaries Podcast. I'm your host, Tracy Wallace. Have you ever felt like you didn't receive the how-to brochure on life? That you didn't get enough guidance about major life issues? So did I. You don't have to be an only child to feel this way. In my podcast, we'll explore some of the best ways to better navigate adulthood while doing so with humor and light. Welcome everyone to the Only Child Diaries Podcast.
Today, I'm gonna share just a little snippet of what has been a very difficult week for myself and my husband. And I'm not gonna go into a lot of detail, but I'll I'll share a window of the week. Um my husband's been in the hospital again. He's there now. He went in uh through the ER of a different hospital uh because we had a different specialist that we we really needed to see, and we couldn't see him in clinic in the office, so we were left with the decision to go in through the ER at the hospital where he practices. And I've talked about ER visits with you before and some of the medical uh challenges that you know we faced. And this particular ER, I had never uh been there with him. We've been to the hospital, but we'd never experienced the ER together. And I would say that overall, I'm not gonna name the hospital, but uh I would say that overall that the experience was a positive one in the ER. I mean the care, the timing that it took for them. I think he was fast-tracked in a way. Um, and I will talk more about what happened this time, um, but with him, but he was fast-tracked, and I think that that was more uh because of what was happening to him. But we were we probably from you know, going in the door to the time that he got on a gurney was probably less than I would say three hours, which was phenomenal, still difficult, but phenomenal. He never got into an actual room in the ER, like an enclosure. He was always in a hallway.
And this is just what the face of medicine uh has become since COVID, because I I think the hospitals, I mean, this is just my take on it. I think that the hospitals learned that they could use the space of their hallways to take in more patients, but I also think that the demand for ER services has increased, and there's reasons for that. I'm not gonna go into what the reasons are, but because I'm not exactly sure, I have my suspicions, but we're not gonna go into that today. Okay, so the first day, the first afternoon and evening of the ER visit was, you know, they did a lot of tests on him. You know, in the first seven or eight hours, they they accomplished a lot, and it was very impressive. And we ended up seeing the resident who directly worked with the surgeon that we wanted to get to, who was out of town, by the way.
And the next day when I went back, because I I couldn't stay there all night with him. There's no way. Uh, the next day when I went back, they had moved him within the ER to another hallway that was directly outside of the trauma bay area. And so we were literally 10 feet or less, it was really it was really more like five feet from the inside of this trauma bay, but uh there were two of them, so you know, overall 10 feet away from these trauma bays, and and if you don't know what that means, um in an ER, the ambulances will come in with people who have experienced really bad injuries, maybe in a car accident. They've something really, you know, they've had a traumatic brain injury, um, they've had a heart attack. Something really bad has happened to them, and they need immediate care, and they need to have a lot of care, a lot of hands on them right away. So we were right in line with the ambulance bay. We could see it, uh, that we could see the door opening, we could see the ambulances pulling. I mean, at least I could. Bill couldn't, because he was not a courney, but um we could see that, and then you know what would happen is that a case would come in and they'd rush them into one of these rooms, and either they would know in advance and there'd be 10 to 20 people waiting for them, or if they rushed in and there was no advan no advance uh uh word, then 20 people would come running after the gurney, the ambulance gurney, right? So this happened again and again and again. I was there from let's say one o'clock in the afternoon to about midnight, and it happened continuously. I will say that the one good thing was that we didn't see or experience any of these patients dying because I think that would be a real possibility, and uh nothing so nothing bad like that happened, but that doesn't mean that doesn't mean that it wasn't incredibly stressful, an already stressful experience. And I had a chair. I had I had lit I couldn't stretch my feet out or anything. I had to sit in the chair because there were continually people pushing gurneys back and forth in front of us, going from one place to another. Maybe the phlebotomist had her cart and she was going back and forth. I mean, literally, there was no space to be anything.
So I'll I'm just gonna tell you about this one case that came in that really touched touched me, and that was a child who had been injured in some way, and I I saw the gurney coming towards us, and it was the mother was in an in a sitting position. They had put the gurney up, so it was you know how you can sit in an ambulance gurney. So she was sitting there strapped into the gurney, holding her child. And I would say I never got a good look at the whole the whole body of the child, but I would say the child was somewhere between like 18 and 24 months old. And when I first saw her coming towards me, she just struck me as so calm and absolutely stunning. She was wearing her sunglasses, she had long dark hair, she was she was beautiful. And even in the face of this emergency, and you can imagine, I mean, I don't have children, but that doesn't mean that I don't f feel this. She was holding on to her child in a very loving manner and trying to protect her child from whatever had happened to this child. She was cradling the child and holding on so that, you know, the child didn't fall off the gurney. They were rushing in, and then all these people rushed in behind behind them, and they drew the curtain so you couldn't see. I would I mean I wasn't gonna look anyway. But for the longest time, we didn't hear anything. You know, there was no cry. I mean, a child in an ER is gonna cry. For if they don't feel any pain, they're just gonna be scared and they're gonna cry. And we didn't hear the mother talking. Um, at one point, it looked like they had brought the father in because he wasn't a non-medical person. And so here we are. Uh after after some time, this medical team from my husband came in came up. And there were six or seven people. Uh, there's the doctor, residents, you know, the fellows, the interns, all that from this particular area standing there in the hallway talking to us, having this serious conversation about my husband's case. That's when the child started to cry. And I was grateful because I thought, well, at least the child's alive, right? But it was super, super stressful. And it was very hard to hear and concentrate on what they were saying about my husband, too. Because the child was screaming, bloody murder, you know, get me out of here, right? Just I mean, it would be terrifying for a child. So, and the mother, you could hear the mother, you know, trying to be like, oh, da-da-da, you know, little noises, little noises that would, you know, entertain a child. And the child just kept screaming. Uh, and I don't even know what was wrong with the child, but it just the whole thing made me cry because I don't want to see a child or hear a child hurt. I just don't. And so anyway, the last part of this was that they finally wheeled. The mother was still sitting in this gurney sitting up, right? And they started, they wheeled them out. She was holding on to the child, but she was putting her hand up to try to shield the child's eyes from seeing everything that the child would see. Like this, like the naked man sitting next to us with wires coming out of every part of his body, or the scary people down the hall, or whatever. She was trying to shield this child from this horrendous experience. And uh hopefully they found an enclosure, a quiet enclosure for them. But anyway, that was that was a lot to take in, you know, and I don't have an issue with sensory uh overload. But I imagine if I did, that would have that would have been a little too much that day. So that was uh that was our second day in the ER. And much, much later
that evening, um, my husband got a room up in the hospital. So more to the story. I will continue the story next week when we uh tackle another topic together. I hope you'll join me. If you like this episode, please follow the Only Child Diaries Podcast on Apple Podcasts or other platforms you might listen on. And consider rating Only Child Diaries and writing a review. It helps others to find us. Please share it with a friend you think might like it as well. Visit my Instagram page, Only Child Diaries, or Facebook, Only Child Diaries Podcast. Thanks for listening. I'm Tracy Wallace, and these are the OnlyCild Diaries.
