In a third room, a college student living on Beacon Hill explained that she was depressed and troubled by a recurrent sensation that came to her during parties. She said she would have the impression that she was invisible and that she was watching the party from across the room, from a different viewpoint. She had attempted suicide two days before by swallowing a bottle of aspirin tablets, but she had vomited them up.

In the fourth room, a husky fifty-one-year-old construction worker discussed his fear that he was going to die suddenly. He knew the fear was groundless but he could not shake it, and his work was suffering, since he was afraid to exert himself and lift heavy objects. He was also bothered by sleeplessness, irritability, and bad headaches. On questioning it developed that his father had died of a stroke almost exactly six years before; the patient remembered his father as "a cold fish that I never liked."

In the lobby of the APS were three other people waiting to talk to the psychiatrists. One woman was crying softly; another stared vacantly out the window. A middle-aged man in a tuxedo and ruffled shirt smiled reassuringly at everyone else in the room.

At 8:30 in the morning, a sixty-year-old widow arrived in the EW and asked to have a doctor remove her hangnail. The administrators at the front desk shrugged and told her it would cost her fourteen dollars. She insisted it was sufficiently important to warrant the expense. But the triage officer flatly refused to do it and told her to cut it herself. Unsatisfied, she wandered around for another fifteen minutes until she finally cornered a resident. She linked her arm in his and demanded that, since he was such a nice young doctor, he please cut her hangnail. He did; she was billed.

Twenty minutes later, a thirty-five-year-old housewife was brought in by the police after she had collapsed in a subway station and suffered an epileptic fit. Soon thereafter, a desperately ill elderly man with disseminated colonic cancer was transferred in from a nursing home. He had a cardiac arrest in the emergency ward and died shortly before noon.