It's been a long time since I've been in a hospital emergency waiting room. Years ago a certain tuna fish sandwich and I disagreed over some secret ingredient. About 3 a.m. I woke up with Popeye the Sailor man's left hand attached to my body. On that hand was a wedding ring that had become more than snug.

On that visit to the emergency room my wait was maybe five minutes. My balloon hand caught the interest of the medical staff on duty. My hand, my wedding ring and I were a pleasant diversion from the gunshot wound in the bay to my left and the drug overdose on my right.

It turns out my stint as Popeye was back in the good old days of big city emergency rooms. I've read in papers and heard on television accounts of a crisis brewing in emergency rooms across the country. They're being shut down as too expensive to run. The ones left are being overtaxed. Uninsured folks use the emergency room as their primary care provider. Things have changed in the hospital emergency room as I witnessed first hand Monday evening.

My son is not a complainer. His SOS call to his mother seemed serious. We picked him up within 30 minutes of his phone call. Off we went.

Northwestern Memorial Hospital is an enormous medical complex in the Streeterville neighborhood of Chicago lying between Lake Shore Drive and Michigan Ave. This is Oprah's neighborhood, the high rent district. I figured the emergency room would be the equivalent of the Ritz.

It's a maze of one-way streets over near Northwestern. Finding the emergency room was tough. But find it, we did, and I dropped mother and son at the door, then sought out a parking garage for the car.

When I finally got in the emergency room waiting room I assumed I was in the wrong place. It looked like the Department of Motor Vehicles on a really bad day. Every form of health complaint seemed represented in that packed waiting room. It seemed foolish to sit in such close proximity of one hundred or so sick people for a potentially endless wait.

I rousted my group from their seats. We had to wait even to sign out to escape. The charge nurse understood our plan to head elsewhere.

"It's like this every night," she said as we made our exit.

Our parking bill was $10 for 30 minutes.

Our sons were born at St. Francis Hospital in Evanston, Ill. That was the emergency room that handled the bad tuna sandwich. The evening was warm, traffic was light, we headed down Lake Shore Drive to Evanston.

There's no charge nurse at St. Francis to greet you. There's just a computer to check yourself in. There are some signs to point you the way to the waiting room. And there, at the end of the hall, a new group, assorted ailments by the dozens, chairs packed tightly together. We sat for an hour. During that

time we encountered one employee

of the hospital. She walked into the waiting room and called out a name. No response. The patient had left. There was no intake, no supervision, a bunch of sick strangers left to fend for themselves packed in a waiting room. One moaning lady wandered off into a restricted area rummaging about.

Seated next to me, a young pregnant mother talked and fiddled on her cell phone for the entire hour we waited. Her two infant children, one in her lap, one in a stroller alternately wailed, slept and cowered from their mother's wrath. The young mother slapped the children, kicked at the stroller and swore constantly at the children for the entire hour. She threatened, berated and manhandled these two little ones who long before had belonged in bed. Never once did the woman put her cell phone down, never once. Child abuse out in the open in a public hospital waiting room but no one of authority even to witness it.

We left after an hour. This time we didn't have to sign out. I reported the monster mother to the nurses smoking out back.

There was no wait at the Mc- Donald's drive-thru. The patient got a Sprite and some chicken tenders. He slept soundly on the drive home.