I recently accompanied my wife to the emergency room at our closest hospital for some cramps that she was having in the lower part of her stomach down under her belly button. The cramps weren’t terribly bad but didn’t go away so we thought it best to go to the emergency room since it would probably take a week to get an appointment at her normal doctor’s office. It was about 10 p.m. when we got to the emergency room at the hospital. We went through the process of getting checked in.
We were taken to a hallway outside the exam rooms where there were chairs and benches on one side of the hallway the exam rooms on the other side of the hallway. There were people on both sides of the hallway waiting. The people on the exam room side were standing since there were no chairs on that side. We were added to the line and we slowly moved down the hallway advancing in the line as a new room would come available. As it turns out, the normal waiting room was being remodeled and couldn’t be used. By the time we were taken to an actual exam room, it was about midnight.
There were four exam rooms along the right side of the hallway. There were quite a lot of people waiting in the hallway and all of the chairs had people in them. Like normal, the ones who were standing were the men that didn’t have a chair. My wife sat down in one of the open chairs and I stood near her on the other side of the hall with the other guys.
We waited around that hallway for over an hour to be seen. During that time people were taken to exam rooms and then the doctors would go to each exam room to see the patient. After they were finished, they would be escorted out and the room would be cleaned and prepared for the next patient.
The hallway was dimly lit, which, I was told, was because it was the night shift according to the person that I had asked. The one weird thing that I noticed as I was waiting in the hallway was that each exam room had a window on it. The window was about two to three feet tall and about two feet wide and it was clear glass. There were blinds on the inside of the window but on each side of the blinds was a small gap of about half inch like the blinds were the wrong size for the window or something.
As I stood outside one of these doors, I noticed that I could see into the exam room if I was close to the door which the guys that were standing in the hallway were. Men were standing in the hallway and milling around waiting for their turn to be seen so possibly they could be standing right in front of a door and peering through the small gap on the side of the window and nobody would even know because that is where they were standing in line.
As people were escorted in and out of the rooms you could see inside the room from the hallway where we were and I noticed that the head of the exam table was on the opposite wall of the door facing the door. The rooms were not very large as maybe about ten by ten feet so the bottom of the exam table where a patient’s feet would be was about four or five feet from the door opening.
The blinds on the door that I was standing in front of were turned facing down and because of that, people in the hallway could not look down through the blinds and see into the room. I thought to myself that if the blinds were turned the other direction and not completely closed it would be very possible for someone standing outside that door could easily see inside the room down through the blinds. I mean, anyone could possibly turn the blinds so that they were slightly open and it would probably not even be noticed.
As I was standing in the hallway and we were waiting for our room, I was thinking about how the doctor was going to determine what was causing my wife’s cramps and what kind of exam she was going to have. I thought that possibly, the doctor might order some blood work, ask her a bunch of questions, and feel around her abdomen and stomach. Remembering Ava’s history of military doctors always performing pelvic exams on her, I thought it would be probable that this doctor might perform a pelvic exam on her as well which led me back to the thought of the blinds on the window. I mean, if the blinds were slightly open, then anyone standing in the hallway could possibly see my wife laying on the exam table with her feet in the stirrups facing the window or even watch my wife having a pelvic exam and even if the blinds weren’t turned up and slightly open, someone could still see through the left or right side of the blinds. This was crazy.
As we were moving down the hallway and getting closer to being the next to be called to go into an exam room, I noticed that two of the four exam room door blinds were actually turned up instead of down. I don’t know why but they were. I was still unable to see into those rooms because the blinds were completely closed but I thought that it wouldn’t take much to open them slightly. Anyway, after a very long time waiting for a room, my wife’s name was called and we were escorted in front of everyone else in the hall into one of these exam rooms by an assistant and it was one of the rooms with the blinds that were facing up instead of down.
There was a chair behind where the door opens, a side chair beside the exam table on one side, and a stool and cabinet on the other side with examination stuff on it. I sat on the chair behind the door. The assistant closed the door and then told my wife to completely take off all of her clothes, put on a gown lay down on the exam table.
Then the greatest thing happened. My wife asked the girl if she could go to use the restroom first and the girl opened the door and led her down the hall.
So, I was left in the room sitting behind the open door right next to the blinds. My mind was racing at that point on if I should take a chance on messing with the blinds as I waited. There were a bunch of men standing outside the door in the hallway and men and women sitting in the chairs on the other side of the hallway. Finally, the devil inside me got the best of me and I reached up and turned the blinds a little open so that anyone outside the room could look down through the blinds and into the room. Then I wanted to actually check to see if it was enough for people in the hallway to see inside so I went out of the room and closed the door behind me and walked down the hall and around the corner. Then I immediately came back to the room and looked down through the blinds and into the room as I was opening the door.
It was perfect. Anyone standing near the door could definitely see into the room. I then turned off the big light inside the room as I entered the room so that my wife would not possibly notice when she came back from the bathroom that the blinds had been slightly opened.
After a few minutes, Ava came back from the bathroom and turned on the light in our room as she came in and asked me why I had it off. I told her that my eyes were bothering me because it was late and she said that we should keep them on. Then she locked the door so no one could come in while she was changing into the gown.