Waiting Room

As has become traditional in this space, it's time to look over the columns of 2006 and see who we offended in the hope of making things right -- or at least getting another column without a lot of heavy lifting. Topping the list of the hugely aggrieved in 2006: home painting contractors. After a column about the nightmare my wife and I had trying to get our living room and dining room painted and the joy of dealing with these people -- estimates that are all over the map, contractors who don't even bother to call you back, contractors who bad-mouth the work of other contractors -- I heard from several ticked-off contractors.

"You leave the Pennsylvania Station 'bout a quarter to 4, read a magazine and then you're in Baltimore."- Chattanooga Choo-Choo If you've been on the train to Scranton and Baltimore and think you're seeing double, you're not. Well, maybe just slightly. News reports last week stated that Amtrak intends to open a 72-room hotel inside Baltimore's Pennsylvania Station within two years. Construction by the developer, James M. Jost & Co. of Columbia, is to begin sometime next summer, said Jost officials.

For Father's Day, I gave my father a disease. Or perhaps it wasthe other way around. Whatever, the result was the same: We both spent that Sunday evening in fevered moaning, popping Tylenol, complaining of heat one moment and cold the next. When we both awoke Monday with the same symptoms, my mother herded us into the family van and drove us to Peninsula General Hospital in Salisbury. At the emergency room, we sat at separate desks to offer information on ourselves to the data processors.

MOSCOW -- Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, short of breath but pointedly standing for a full five-minute television interview, appeared for the first time in public last night since he was hospitalized a week ago.Mr. Yeltsin, 64, told Russian Public Television he'd suffered a heart attack July 11, but, "I'll be in operation soon. The doctors say the recovery will be complete, without any consequences."At least Russians now know that Mr. Yeltsin isn't dead or dying in a hospital bed.But given the Russian reflex for intrigue, the question about Mr. Yeltsin's hospitalization was not simply, "Is he healthy?"

Parents entering the Carroll Children's Center in Hampstead must make an immediate decision. The door to the left bears a prominent sign: SICK ROOM. The door to the right identifies the WELL ROOM.The layout of this newest pediatric center in Carroll County, which was opened in November by two partners, Dr. Michael J. Scobie and Dr. Charles M. Ashburn, distinguishes it from the offices of many family practitioners and hospital-style clinics, where some patients are reluctant to seek routine examinations because they dislike sitting in the waiting room among the sick.

A nurse popped her head inside the door of a small waiting room in the Pediatric Care Unit at University of Maryland Medical Center, found Diane White and said, "Your little boy wants you."With this, Mrs. White rose to her tired feet and walked a long, clean hall to the room where her 6-foot-tall, 15-year-old son, her "little boy," lay in a bed with a bullet in his back and the fear that he might have suffered a permanent, disabling injury."The doctors don't know for sure yet," Mrs. White said.

As V-hour approached, an odd silence fell across the country. No matter how far away you were -- in a hospital waiting room in Baltimore, on a train speeding to New York, at a bait shop in the Outer Banks -- you could hear the papery rustle of an envelope being opened in a courtroom in Los Angeles."

HERE'S A LITTLE piece of advice for anyone who ends up in an emergency room: Better have a harpoon sticking out of your chest.I say this because if you have a harpoon sticking out of your chest, there is at least an outside chance of your being treated in the next several hours.Whereas if you arrive with any lesser injury -- a badly-sprained ankle swollen to the size of a honeydew melon, for example -- you'll end up sitting in a hard plastic chair reading 2-year-old issues of People or watching a kitchen renovation on "This Old House" until you finally keel over from the pain.

Painters, electricians and physicians are putting the finishing touches on a Westminster office that will offer primary medical care to as many as 2,000 patients annually after it opens later this month. The workers are among dozens of volunteers and professionals who have donated time and supplies to transform a vacant and cavernous 2,100- square-foot office above David's Jewelers, off East Main Street, into Access Carroll. "This was an empty rectangle. We literally built it from scratch," said Dr. Robert Wack, a pediatrician at Carroll Hospital Center and a member of the Access Carroll committee.

A NEW "E.R." has come to town this month, and what an E.R. it is. This is not a fictionalized television emergency room, but a $16 million, 34,500-square-foot cutting-edge "emergency center" at Sinai Hospital that intends to break from the old E.R. concepts.Everyone dreads visiting an emergency room. The trauma of the waiting room -- and the wait -- is often worse than the reason for being there.Sinai decided to ask patients and their families what's wrong with emergency rooms. Then they modeled their "ER-7" on customer complaints.