Attic Salt for Nov. 8, 2009

• By ED CULLEN
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Nov 8, 2009

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I have a new favorite place to watch Saints football — the ER waiting room at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center.

The OLOL ER waiting room had everything but beer on tap Monday night as the formerly hapless Saints, now everyone’s darling football team, played the Atlanta Falcons.

Almost everyone in the waiting room sat facing a television at the far end of the room, the television so loud you didn’t hear it. You felt it.

Every time the Saints scored, intercepted a pass, made a long run, caught a pass or sacked the Falcons’ quarterback, a head-splitting, collective yell erupted.

I’d driven someone to the ER. I felt fine. But I felt for the poor woman who held a cloth, dampened at the water fountain, against her forehead.

"Migraine," she mouthed soundlessly.

Every time the Saints fans yelled, the woman with the migraine flinched as though she’d been slapped.

A man jumped to his feet and threw his cap on the floor when the Saints fumbled.

"It’s OK, we’ll get it back," said the man sitting next to him.

A woman wrapped in a Saints blanket paced the waiting room before taking a seat near me. The game was back and forth. She couldn’t sit. I never figured out if she was waiting to see a doctor or had brought someone to the hospital. I guess she was wrapped in the Saints blanket when the emergency arose.

Cops. Sheriff’s deputies. State Police troopers. EMS crews. Orderlies. Security guards. Came and went. Pausing beneath the television to check the score and watch a play before moving on.

In this bedlam, came a serene voice at 9 p.m. over the room’s loud speaker. The OLOL evening prayer for the sick and anyone else inside the hospital’s walls.

Back to action. The Saints did something wonderful, and there was this streak of white shirt over black pants running down one side of the ER waiting room to cry pure joy at the television set. It was one of the ER waiting room’s security individuals.