[3] Not Dying, Apparently
I knew the procedure of Accident and Emergency; I’d spent enough time sitting there with broken bits and pieces throughout my childhood.
A&E is essentially this: you notify the bored and grumpy
woman behind the desk that you have arrived. She has better things to be doing
than worrying about you, but no-one is really sure what those better things
are. She points you to a seat and you sit and wait. For hours. And hours. And
nothing happens, until you are called in to a triage room, where someone
assesses you and doesn’t seem the slightest bit interested in what’s painful or
how much it hurts. They shepherd you back out to the waiting room and you sit
and wait some more.
Except after notifying the bored looking woman, my arse didn’t
come within ten feet of a chair before I was pulled in to a room to see the woman
who wasn’t going to be the least bit interested in what was painful or how painful
it was.
My blood pressure was low; it wasn’t so much pumping through
my body as it was trickling leisurely and moving with all the urgency of water
in a canal. My heart rate was high; nine hundred beats per minute, or so it
seemed.
Another room followed. This one contained a Student Doctor
and a Doctor Doctor, and they set about examining me in more detail. Eyes no
longer spinning, face cooling slightly, I knew where I was – I had been sobered
by people lying on stretchers with bits hanging off and blood pouring out. But
I felt guilty; here I was with no outward signs of anything wrong and I was
being whisked through the process quicker than everyone. This had never
happened before, not even when my left ankle was hanging off after my
back-flip-to-impress-a-girl acrobatic display had gone horribly wrong at
school. I thought it must be serious.
Student Doctor wanted to do this test and that test and a
blood test; definitely a blood test, to see if I was infected. I knew it, I
thought; Ebola. Doctor Doctor scalded him;
‘Do you really
think he’s infected?!’
‘Um, no, I suppose probably not’.
No blood test was done.
I sat on the bed and looked at the legs sticking out in
front of me. The same legs I had seen propped up on the desk in the office;
they must belong to me I thought.
Doctor Doctor left. Student Doctor attached some sticky pads
to all sorts of different places and hooked me up to a machine which had the
ability to tell him if I was dying or not. Doctor Doctor came back, Student
Doctor had attached some of the sticky pads in the wrong place, so Doctor
Doctor ripped them off without warning and stuck them somewhere else.
Then I leant forward, and both of them started tapping me on
the back, like I was some kind of Djembe drum. They tapped the same way my Dad
used to tap the wall to see where it was hollow before hanging a picture.
When all was said and done I wasn’t dying. My blood pressure
was low, my heart was fast, but I wasn’t going to go out in a head-burning,
eye-spinning blaze of glory any time soon. So they sent me on my way without
really saying what the matter was and with the detailed advice to drink ‘an
awful lot’ of water.
I didn’t know which way was up and which way was down. Not
half an hour ago I was dying. My eyes
were going to pop out and my head was on fire. I didn’t even recognize my
own trousers and my own boots. I blacked out in a car park for God’s sake. Now they
had tapped me on the back to make sure I was hollow - or wasn’t hollow - I was
being turfed out on the street in the hope that I would live.
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