And It Makes Me Wonder

I leave the Intensive Care Unit through the front entrance, where the patients’ families enter and exit. It’s Monday, and I proceed with the routine I follow every Monday after lunch.

I go to the ICU waiting room and collect the various tracts from the Jehovah’s Witnesses and throw them in the trash. I walk down the stairway to the Cardiac Critical Care unit’s waiting room and collect them—The Watchtower and Awake!—and throw them in the garbage. I take the other stairway down three more flights to the Surgery Waiting room and do the same.

I’ll knock on the Women’s room door and if there’s no answer, I’ll go through the stalls and remove the tracts—‘What does God require of us?’ ‘Should you believe in the Trinity,’ and ‘Jehovah’s Witnesses: Who are they? What do they believe?’—that have been tucked into the toilet paper dispensers.

They do not leave tracts in the Men’s room. I’m not certain if this is because the people leaving the tracts are women, they think men tend to use religion rather than be used by religion, or if they simply don’t think that men are worth saving.

In any case, the Trauma waiting room is a secured location, so I don’t have to include it on my Monday rounds as I take the staff stairway into the ED.