It was like a dream.
My face felt like it was in a warm bath. But my back felt cold and damp.
I thought perhaps I just needed to turn over in bed, but this didn’t feel like my bed. It was hard, and why did it hurt to move?
I opened my eyes to a muted blue sky splotched on the edges by the canopies of large oak trees.
My bed is the raised gravel pavement of the Dunleith Castle parking lot in Natchez, Mississippi.
My glasses are in front of me on the ground. My keys are some distance away in the grass. My hands and arms were weirdly contorted under my body. Is that a tooth?!
There’s a well-dressed white man who walks past me from his car toward the bar entrance in the same parking lot.
Then I remembered. We were having dinner, celebrating my mom’s birthday. And at some point I passed out. “Oh, no! No, no, no…,” I thought, as I got up to walk back to the restaurant.
I thought I’d tell my brother, Nehemiah Luckett, to get my keys so I could go back to the hotel, but that they should continue dinner.
I went to dial his phone number, but my screen was obscured by rain and the blood that was pouring from my face. My fingers could not make sense of the screen, like they had forgotten what to do.
But before my frustration could give way to full-blown panic, my brother emerged from the restaurant, saw me, ran toward me, and put his arms around me to hold me up. “I got you,” he said.
I muttered through a mouthful of blood, “I need my keys.”
“What?! Why?” my brother asked.
“I’m going back to the hotel.”
“You are not going to the hotel. You’re going to a hospital,” he scolded gently.
Then the maître d’ came outside and got me a chair. Then my brother-in-law came outside. Then my wife and mother—exactly the very thing I didn’t want to happen.
I had ruined my mother’s birthday.
At the thought of it I sobbed uncontrollably.
The only response I could muster to every question I was being asked was, “I’m sorry.”
Because I was sorry. I wanted so much better for my mother. I was so deeply sorry.
They called an ambulance that took me to Merit Health Natchez hospital.
As they wheeled me in on the stretcher, a nurse at the nurses’ station asked me to recount how I fell. Because of the injury to my mouth, I struggled to speak.
I explained how one moment I felt fine and had even taken a moment to snap a picture of the beautifully lit pathway to the restaurant, how I noticed that it was beginning to rain, so I thought I would trot to my car.
Before I could finish, another nurse interjected, “And how did that work out for you?”
Then they laughed.
Had I been thinking clearly, had I not been disoriented, had I not needed help, had I had the strength, I would have walked out.
I was told they did not have a room, so I was wheeled against a wall in a hallway. After some time, someone came by to do an EKG from a mobile cart. Then I was wheeled away for a chest X-ray and a CT scan of my head. Afterward, they wheeled me back to the hallway, where I waited for hours.
I watched a Black dad come in with his small daughter and get told to sit on another hospital bed wheeled to a spot in the hallway in front of me. His daughter had apparently managed to get hold of some pills, and the dad was concerned that she had ingested some.
He was struggling to handle a very active toddler while trying to convey what was happening to the child’s mother on the phone. The doctor walked up, and the dad was trying to communicate with the doctor and the mom simultaneously when the doctor erupted, “Get off the phone. I’m talking to you.” After a series of questions, the doctor listened to the child’s chest, concluded that if she had consumed the pills she would present differently, and discharged them.
I overheard an elderly Black man from a room somewhere behind me yell, “I ain’t telling you shit!” His adult daughters said, “Daddy, don’t be like that. She’s trying to help you.” He fired back, “They ask me the same thing over and over. I’ve been here for five hours and they still haven’t brought me the damn blanket I asked for. You were born in Louisiana and I will die in Louisiana. I don’t know why you brought me to this crappy hospital in Mississippi in the first place.”
“Five hours in the ER?!” I thought. “Not good.”
I’m about three hours in.
I’m not sure when I would have been seen had it not been for the constant calls from the waiting room by my wife and family for an update on what was happening.
I remember a nurse passing me in the hallway saying, “It looks like you’re about to fall asleep. Let me get you a blanket.”
Some time after, the doctor appeared and asked me what happened. After I explained again, he said that he was discharging me with some pain medication.
I responded, “Doctor, I’ve experienced an oral trauma. Is there somewhere I can go to get help with my mouth? How am I going to eat?!” He replied that my injuries were not serious enough for surgery. In his own words, “No one [surgeon] is going to get out of bed for this. You’ll have to make do until Tuesday and then go see your dentist.”
It was the Saturday evening of the weekend before Labor Day.
They discharged me with an avulsed incisor that my brother had found and the EMTs had put in milk, with my front two teeth dangling by their roots, and without having so much as washed the blood from my face.
My wounds were not cleaned, and a significant injury beneath my nose went unaddressed. Apparently, after I passed out, I hit the ground head first with such force that it sheared my nose and top lip apart. Also, there was no concussion protocol that I recall.
Unbeknownst to me, my brother and his husband, Florian Brey, who is a doctor, were looking into other options for my treatment. Together with my wife, they found a Level 1 Trauma Center at UMMC in Jackson, Mississippi, that offered emergency oral and maxillofacial surgery. My doctor brother-in-law had the surgeon on call there paged, and he promptly returned their call and discussed my case for twenty minutes.
The surgeon then urged them to get me to the Emergency Department in Jackson as soon as possible, where he operated and stabilized me that same night.
I write this after several oral procedures, including a bone graft, with several more procedures to go.
What this experience impressed upon me is that my personal responsibility did not matter in that hospital in Natchez.
It did not matter that I have two degrees.
It did not matter that I live in a neighborhood with an HOA.
Even my insurance did not matter.
And it shouldn’t have mattered.
To be clear, no one should have to possess any special advantages to access competent, compassionate care. My point is, an attitude of “I’ll take care of me and mine” does not matter where care is not accessible.
And all that Southern hospitality we’re so proud of, that care and concern that I am genuinely convinced we individually have for our neighbors, does not matter…
Unless that care and concern can be found in collective expressions, such as infrastructure that equitably attends to the care of us all, like hospitals.
Because that’s what mattered in my moment of need, and it is what’s needed in such moments for our fellow Mississippians and countrymen.
This is what is needed rather than gutting the institutions and programs that serve to make us collectively healthier and stronger.
That is what I want, and that is what I will be voting for this Tuesday in support of Scott Colom for Senate.
I’m voting for more than just me. I’m voting for us. Let’s do this together. #vote
