“Mandy? Mandy!”“What? What’s wrong?” I rolled over, sweaty from my nap and groggy. My first thought wasn’t disturbed at being woken up, but confusion at how long I’d slept and what time it was.I’d come home from an early morning rehearsal, done some work, some writing, made some plans for later in the evening, and fallen asleep to reruns of What Not to Wear.“We have to go!”“Huh?”“Ryan was in a bike accident, they’re taking him to the emergency room. We have to go.”Oh. God.“Is he okay? What happened? Do I have time to pee?”“Yes, I have to change clothes then we’ll go.” She yelled to me from behind her bedroom door. Suze was still in pajama bottoms and a tee-shirt, unshowered. I heard her rustling around her closet for jeans.As we drove up Michigan and turned our heads toward the direction of every ambulance siren we heard, she rambled on. She wasn’t sure what had happened, except that a man named Al had called, told her that Ryan had been in an accident and that the ambulance was there and they were taking him to the hospital.When we found them it was difficult to gauge how traumatic the situation could be. Al was standing beside the closed ambulance doors, wearing a bright FedEx uniform, his green SUV parked by the side of the intersection. And Ryan’s bike – which seemed in fine condition as far as I could tell, lay abandoned off the road on a mound of gravel.Neither paramedic came out to tell us how he was. It wasn’t until a police officer pulled up, listened to everything that we knew, and knocked on the side door of the ambulance, that we finally knew he hadn’t been hit by a car. That his leg was broken and that he was in a lot of pain.The cop gave us directions to the hospital and after Suze leaned out the window and said “Thanks ossifer,” we both burst out laughing. The first real deep breaths either of us had taken in 45 minutes.I spent most of the rest of the day waiting in the emergency room with Suze and Shawn. Twenty minutes after we arrived they shut down the ER to all outside visitors and brought in three gunshot victims. At 2:30 in the afternoon. Who shoots someone at 2:30 in the afternoon?After four attempts to get back to talk to him, and almost three hours of waiting, we finally decided to pitch a big enough fit with the people behind the locked ER doors. They wouldn’t let us see him but they brought us his cell phone and Suze started calling his friends and family to let them know what had happened. She and Shawn stayed for the late shift and I went home to shower for the second time that day and have a beer.We were all back at the hospital this morning when visiting hours began and they’d moved Ryan into his own room, his pillow with a Red Sox case tucked behind his head, his leg wrapped and splinted from toe to knee cap.After sending Suze and Shawn home, I curled up in a corner chair and stayed until they took him into surgery a few hours later. We talked about the baseball scores and laughed about the fact that reality was nothing like Grey’s Anatomy. I kept waiting for my own Dr. McDreamy. He never came. Instead we got a barely-English speaking orderly and nurse who both insisted on yanking Ryan’s cut jeans (now shorts) off of him, instead of just cutting them the rest of the way to ease the maneuvering process.“Why don’t you just cut them off of him? Ryan is that okay?”He winced and then nodded as the orderly kept pulling.“Seriously. Can you get some scissors?” I asked again.“I don’t have scissors.”“Can you find some?!” I was irritated.“No. We can do it this way.” He replied, a barely understandable and curt phrase.Ryan was still wincing.Where were George O’Malley and Izzie Stephens when I needed them?With my supervision and the nurse’s help, we finally got them off and I left the room so that they could move him to the gurney.As they pulled him into the hallway, I patted his shoulder and told him that it’d be fine. That someone would be there when he woke up and not to worry. I watched as they rolled him away for surgery and I couldn’t help but think - if it were me, I’d be scared. And probably shaking. A lot. And very much missing my mom.Now...knowing that Ryan’s okay, doped up on morphine and probably still asking everyone that walks in the door what the score of the Red Sox game was...I’m grateful. Tired and running on fumes, but grateful. We do our best to be there for the people we care about. Even if it’s not an emergency. Even if we just take five extra minutes to drive them two blocks at three in the morning because they shouldn’t be walking alone. Because we can’t exist alone. It’s too hard. But more than that, we shouldn’t have to. So we collect people. Collect them from internships, from group houses, from blind dates, from officemates and committees, and even sometimes from blogs. In a city as transient as DC, we make family out of what we have. Subscribe in a reader