Wednesday, August 06, 2008

who goes where

The private road veers up and off in an exclusive arc high above the main sea route, as illustrative of the residents’ earnings differential as a steep black line on a graph. The houses here – a grandly stucco’d selection of Caribbean villas, contemporary mansions and sternly cast homesteads with eagles on pillars and spiked electric gates – are set way back from the road. The caller must have used a telescope to report her concerns.
The car we want is easy to spot: a small, banana yellow affair parked crookedly by the raised grass bank at the verge. When we draw closer we can see a pair of legs sticking out of the opened passenger door, jeans down by the ankles, bare feet. I jump out of the vehicle.
There is a middle-aged woman lying across the two front seats, her head in an empty metal dog bowl. There is a bottle of vodka in one foot well, a can of deodorant in another, and around them both a scattering of empty pill packets. There are some clothes spilling out of a holdall on the back seat, but other than this the car seems quite well kempt.
‘Hello. It’s the ambulance. My name’s Spence and this is Rae. Can I ask your name?’
She raises her head to look at me like she’s being hauled up on a chain. She tries to speak, but her mouth is claggy with a white residue.
‘Say again,’ she manages.
‘It’s the ambulance. People are worried about you.’
She slumps back down again. ‘Hah. That’s rich.’
‘What’s happened to you today? Are you hurt in any way? Come on – sit up so we can talk to you.’
We help her. She starts making an ill-focused attempt to pull her trousers back up.
‘Sorry about this,’ she says.
‘Don’t worry about that for the moment. First things first. Can you tell me your name?’
‘Sandy.’
‘What are all these pill packets here, Sandy? Have you taken them?’
She shakes her head.
‘Where are the pills then, Sandy?’
‘I was going to take them, but I didn’t’ she says, her cracked lips struggling up into something like a smile. ‘I wanted to kill myself, but I couldn’t’
‘Have you had much to drink?’
‘Half a bottle of vodka’
‘But no pills?’
She shakes her head.
‘Sandy – let us help you onto the ambulance so we can check you over properly and have a chat to decide what to do.’
She blinks asymmetrically, focuses on me, then hauls her mouth into a big statement.
‘I’m not going to hospital, so don’t even think about it.’
‘Sandy – to be quite blunt – we can’t force you to come to hospital, but we can’t possibly leave you here. If you refuse, we’ll call the police, they’ll arrest you, and you’ll end up in hospital anyway. At least if you come with us you won’t have all that extra fuss and embarrassment.’
She shakes her head and starts trying to pull her jeans up again. They are soaked through with urine.
‘Just give me a minute,’ she says.
I wonder if the caller is watching us from a balcony somewhere.

‘Where do you live, Sandy?’
She gives me an address, the other side of town.
‘What’s the dog bowl for?’
‘My dog’
‘Is your dog here?’
‘I dropped him at my mother-in-law’s’
‘What sort of dog have you got?’
‘A sharpy’
‘What – is that like a husky or something?’
‘No – squashy face’
She looks up at me, her eyes bloodshot and her face puffy with the trauma of everything.
‘Oh yes – I know’ I say, as if looking at her face has helped me place the dog. ‘A sharpy.’

We lift her into a carry chair and away into the ambulance. Rae locks Sandy’s car up and brings back her shoes and jacket. She has about five hundred pounds in cash in the pockets.

At the hospital, A&E is as busy as I’ve seen it in a while. There are crews queuing with their patients all along the corridor. When I go to handover to Elena, the charge nurse, she has a board marker in one hand, two clipboards in the other and one under her arm. She stands astride the centre of the department, dispensing order and place like a fierce blue postman sorting letters at Christmas.
‘Dehydrated old lady to resus one, pleuritic chest pain to cubicle three.’
(Takes a phone call, signs something, pushes a heap of forms across to a passing nurse).
‘And you,’ she smiles, hanging the phone up and then scrawling her signature onto my sheet, ‘You my friend, please could you take your OD to cubicle number five.’ She tosses the board back to me.
Sandy gets wheeled into position.

7 comments:

Flash Bristow said...

I guess she meant a Shar Pei.

loveinvienna said...

Poor woman. Did you find out what had nearly made her commit suicide? I could almost feel the disapproving stares of the people in their mock-colonial houses as you described the nature of the suburb!

Liv xxx

Spence Kennedy said...

Flash - you're absolutely right! I'm sure she knew how to spell the breed, but I'd never heard of them before! (Note to self: must be better at follow-up research...) ;)

Liv - never did find out what led her to that spot. She certainly stuck out in that neighbourhood, though - the car, the legs out of the side door.... I'm surprised they didn't have the police there!

loveinvienna said...

I can just imagine the call to the Operator:

A:'Can you tell me what happened?'
B:'Well, there is a yellow KIA PICANTO on the main road of *insert place name*!'
A:'A... Kia Picanto?'
B:'Yes! A yellow Kia, for god's sake!'
A:'And can you see anyone driving it? Are they injured in anyway?'
B:'Are you mad? I'm not going anywhere NEAR that CAR, goodness knows WHAT I'll find...
A: 'Er... ok. Does there seem to be anything untoward about the car? Any damage to it?'
B: It's a KIA for god's sake, of COURSE there is something untoward about it!'
A: 'And that would be?'
B: 'THE BADGE ON THE BONNET! The whole MAKE of the car! God, no wonder the country is going to the dogs... I haven't seen anything like it since... since... Ford took over Jaguar! I mean, whoever thought THAT up must have been a moron...'

Ok, so that's a very stereotypical view of what might be said, but I did have fun writing it :P

Liv xxx
PS. Hope she was alright, by the way :)

Spence Kennedy said...

It would be interesting to hear the call taker's side of that one. We never did learn who had made the call - it certainly wasn't the patient! It could've been a passer by, I suppose. It just suited my post to think it may have been one of the residents looking on. Loved your re-enactment, btw!

Although she'd taken quite a few pills, none of them was a high OD risk. Plus, she'd chosen quite a public place to do all this - in a yellow car, in the middle of the day. So although she was undoubtedly suffering signifcant emotional distress, I don't think it was an overly serious attempt to kill herself.

Sx

Karla said...

Great blog! I can't stop reading. I'm working my way up from the first one.

I work as a volunteer in the States. Normally patients are referred to my their names. Is referring to them by their symptoms common there?

Spence Kennedy said...

Hi Karla!

Phew - you really are starting way back. I had a job finding this one! That's dedication beyond the call of duty...

The staff would only refer to patients by their symptoms when they're updating the A&E board - where patients are / what they're in for / what's been done & needs doing. Along the lines of...'This one's a collapse query cause blah blah...' But mostly it's names, of course.

Cheers for the comment, Karla - I'm really pleased you like the blog :)