The emergency room at Grandview Medical Center, located on Grandview Parkway in Birmingham, Alabama is on the second floor. To get to emergency parking, you turn left at the entrance. Have cash handy. Parking is five dollars, and if you've driven into the wrong parking deck, you have to get your token and pay before leaving it. Drive up the ramp and park on the second level of the deck.

You'll feel (and especially so if you are drunken with pain or illness) like you've parked on a rooftop for planes. The concrete landing is a sort of unhealthy white in the blistering sunshine; it's the sort of white that hurts your eyes from the inside, like when you walk outside after your eyes are dilated.

When the doors open, it feels like you're entering a sealed vault. They roll apart, and then air as loud as an eight wheeler's engine blows on you for ten seconds. If this air had a color it would be a plastic white, like the walls, and the floor, and the ceiling.

This is where everyone turns around to see why loud air is blowing again; seeing if you're a patient, or someone's son who promised he was on his way.

You wouldn't think the patients are sick. Some must have a terminal illness because they carry big bags like they've done this a thousand times.

Sometimes, at night, there will be only one person in the waiting room. Other times, it's filled with quiet faces. Sort of like a nursing home.

On this particular day, it was like the latter. The Olympics played silently on the flat-screened monitor perched calmly on the wall. There may have been stains on the blue seats. The walls were new, and the plastic siding made a cracking noise if you leaned on it.

A quiet, Sunday afternoon vibe, that makes you want to nap between church services, nestled between the patients and their family members.

Every now and then, an office door would open and a nurse would come out with a name list.

"Johnson!"

"Mrs.Corely?"

"Mr. Swisth..eh...um..."

Do nurses have hearts?

The cheery nurse we saw that day laughed with all the patients. A hypertensive woman's high blood pressure could plunge just by his appalling lack of bedside manner.

I think I saw a nurse flustered there once before, though. Perhaps it was more practicality than anxiety. Maybe nurses really do care, but they can't care because it hurts so much.

Next to the parking deck door there was a desk that wrapped around the wall like some sort of weed or fungus. Behind it was a flustered, wide-eyed receptionist with steady fingers. She was drowning in a sea of papers and requests, and family members. But she smiled in her flustered way that made everyone trust her, and she quieted the room like its central nervous system.

Like at any hospital, the visits always seem excluded from time. It will be morning when you enter, and night when you leave. But somehow it's the night of a different day. Maybe when you visit a hospital you're really entering a time capsule.

This day, it seemed perpetually Sunday afternoon.

Just when we entered, we left. Somehow hours had passed.

When we went, it was just like when we came. The massive doors groaned. The air gust down. This time, the noise it made sounded like the blustery whine of a vacuum.

People in the waiting room, sometimes the same faces from the first time, turned. Sadly, they stopped looking.

It's no one for you.

We walked onto the deck that always smells like nothing, and is high enough from the ground to make ears stuffy.

The cars are just as quiet as their owners.

That day there were two people, as small as two kittens in comparison to the massive deck, talking. Although just an elbow away, I still couldn't hear what they said. Based on their faces, it didn't seem very good.

If you parked on the first deck, you have to use the elevator just outside the door. It's polished silver, with the distorted reflection on a new stainless steel refrigerator, and big enough to fit at least two wheelchairs. It smells like IV fluids and popcorn.

The elevator quietly hummed as we left the ER, just like the it never happened. Did it really?

Ten seconds pass, and if you're a slow walker, you might hear the loud doors seal shut.

Hopefully you've got five dollars in your pocket.