Day 2 started on a lighter note than Day 1. There was a nice big breakfast, I felt more of the "family" aspect of the hospital, and there was a lot of joking throughout the morning. There were a few dry presentations, but not everyone can take a topic and turn it into something enthralling.
I learned more about my fellow residents ; some of them are a bit charismatic, some of them not so much but then again you can't really know a person after one morning watching lectures with them, and quite a few of them are married. I didn't really know what to make of that, hopefully they're older than I am.
I ate lunch and got re-certified at Basic Life Support, then left promptly with just enough time to obtain my parking sticker, which is now good for a year. Apparently this area of town actually does have parking enforcement officers (two of them). Maybe I should start putting quarters in the meter when I go to the laundromat. Nah.
I received my second set of shoes from amazon and, once again, disappointingly, found them to be oversized. Then I found out amazon didn't wanna play ball on a second exchange, instead my only option was to return the shoes. I then found out the same shoes were available for much less money from the Walking Company, so I called them and rushed down there to order from them and return the amazon-bought shoes at a UPS store, post haste. I'm getting quite proficient at making amazon returns. However, the traffic on the road at the time did slow this whole escapade down and it ended up taking me an hour to actually get to the UPS store.
At the mall, I decided to tool around a bit since I did not want to be continually fighting traffic, so I ate after ordering the shoes, and then I walked into an electronics store to find a blue-tooth keyboard for my soon-to-be-bought tablet. 5 x 10 1/8 inches were the dimensions of the keyboard which I deemed would be sufficiently big to allow my fingers to throw down words at the blistering speeds I demand of them.
On the way to the exit, I went to the bathroom and, upon exiting the bathroom, heard a woman crying. I turned the corner and found a Hispanic woman with an infant in her arms, both alive and well for all intents and purposes. She was crying, and I immediately asked if she and her child were alright, if there was anything I could do, if she needed to go anywhere or needed to call anyone. All responses indicated she did not need my help, so at first I did what my parents trained me to do, which was to walk away. I got about 12 meters away when I realized I simply couldn't turn my back on this woman, but hesitated because I wasn't sure what, if anything, I was qualified or equipped to do. The least I could do, I figured, was obtain more information and listen to her. I am trained to listen at the very least. In an effort to negotiate more trust and information out of her, I went to the nearest food stall I could find and grabbed some napkins so that I could offer them to her so she could wipe her tears. I went back in the direction of the bathroom and turned the corner.
She was gone. No door movement, no sounds down the hallway, gone. The universe had vaporized this woman and her child, and I knew I would most likely never find out why she was crying, what was going on, nothing. A security guard came by and I asked if someone had alerted him about the woman. He said yes and then asked me for information on her appearance. Hopefully, he found her and something somehow was resolved, but I'll never really know. I don't know what I should have done, or whether it would have made a difference if I had stayed or simply made her more uncomfortable. What would you have done?
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