emergency

It’s 7:30pm on a Wednesday night and I’m in the packed waiting room at St Vincent’s hospital, wearing slides with two pairs of socks over my Lululemon tights which are bloodstained from the recent journey my shin took into the side of a wooden box, which is why I’m here and basically sets the scene for this whole fucking spiel. You know how half the time I’m all I AM AMAZING and the other half I’m like curled into the foetal position with Graham and rocking with silent tears ? Cue world’s smallest violins please.

Have you ever been here before? Asks the hospital administration lady and I say no, remembering the other times that I have been in other hospitals because of my own stupidity and giving myself a mental pat on the back that this time it actually isn’t my fault that I need medical assistance (these times are also great stories). She looks up my name (Florence, like the city) and lets me know that yes I have been here before, and it’s odd that one would forget being hit by a car. I laugh. Oh yea that’s right, sorry. She smiles and asks to confirm my details, has anything changed ? Just my address…I say and she notes it down. Still married to… ? It sounds like a statement rather than a question and I realise I’d forgotten yet another thing that’s happened in my life that should probably hold some higher level of importance. Oh…no, not anymore, I say. She plows unrelentingly through the awkward silence by asking if I have any family here…No…so you’re here alone then, she states confidently. I gulp and feel a lump in my throat begin to form as I nod. OK, that’s all we need for now, have a seat and someone will be with you as soon as they can. I thank her and shuffle in my double sock/slide combo back across the room to find two free seats next to each other, one obviously for my bag so I can avoid some potentially diseased person sitting too close to me. I settle in for my wait and not too surreptitiously survey my waiting room companions.

There’s about twelve other people in various states of emergency distributed around me, lit by a harsh fluorescent light that makes blood look brighter and the dark circles under their eyes look darker. I try and guess what’s wrong with them, as besides the tall blonde girl with her hand wrapped in a blood stained bandage, everyone looks suspiciously OK, so I’m assuming they have some horrific ailment with no immediately obvious symptoms, like the initial stages of bubonic plague. Everyone is sitting in pairs, the assumedly non-emergency half with a highlighter yellow ‘visitor’ badge stuck to their clothing, and I watch as they reassure their respective invalids with knee pats and trips to the vending machine across the corridor for high calorie and nutrition-less snacks (my dinner was a muesli bar with 29g of sugar. It was amazing). I wonder if I should get a yellow sticker for my bag and the lump in my throat keeps growing and it’s not the 400 calories worth of muesli bar I just ate but the sudden intensely overwhelming feeling of being alone and I can feel tears start pouring down my face and I can’t make them stop.

Remember that scene from Fight Club when Ed Norton’s character goes to all those support groups to try and cure his insomnia, and finds that he can only sleep after he has sobbed into Bob’s big man tits at the Testicular Cancer Support Group? That’s me right now in the St Vinnie’s waiting room, with no-one’s tits to cry into but my own shit ones and I keep going for too long and soon all the other patients are awkwardly trying to avoid eye contact with me as I sob uncontrollably and blatantly wipe my nose on the sleeve of my Kathmandu jacket. I reckon the nurse calls my name first just to stop everyone else having to witness my Triage 1 meltdown because I’m pretty sure hand-bandage chick was here before me and according to the waiting room information screen I’d been watching on repeat I’m a ‘Triage Level 4’, and patients will be seen not in the order they came in but in the order of injury severity, but maybe there’s some clause like *unless they are crying hysterically because our adminstration process made them realise how insignificant their existence is.

I’m still snuffling miserably as the jeans-clad (casual Wednesday?) male nurse leads me down the brightly lit hallway to stitch my shin back together. I try to make my pathetic state less awkward for him by making a joke about how I can be covered with tattoos and still be a massive sook, as I’d rather he think I’ve been bawling shamelessly over my Triage Level 4 status than the fact that I didn’t know who to put as my emergency contact, but he’s obviously not the bedside manner type and just nods vaguely as he sews my torn skin together. It literally takes him minutes to close the gaping hole in my shin and before I know it I’m standing outside in the rain waiting for a taxi. There’s an older lady ahead of me in the line and she looks like the cute Nana from Happy Gilmore and I can’t imagine how someone could just let their Nana catch a taxi home from the hospital at night. The realisation that I could be her in 40 years hits me harder than my shin hit the box that ended me here in the first place and I smile at her and help her with her bags just in case I’m the only human contact she has and she’s also going home to watch Season 3, Episode 22 of The OC with her cat.

Good night ? enquires the taxi driver as I get in which is such a stupid question to ask someone you’ve picked up from the emergency room that I laugh and say yes thanks I had a great muesli bar. *end violins*

. . .

I think that I’ve fought so long and hard (lol) to prove to myself and to the universe that I don’t need anyone that I’ve somehow forgotten all of the good things about having people, like how warm and safe you feel when you know they give a fuck about you, and that you won’t have to hesitate to call them when something Actually Bad happens, like your cat dies or your stove top creepily switches itself on again and this time doesn’t just burn the fuck out of 4kg worth of butternut pumpkin, but your whole apartment. Having someone you know wouldn’t hesitate to wear that yellow sticker and pat your knee and let you bawl into their tits is fucking invaluable, and if that person isn’t a cat then you are definitely winning. Basically, embrace the shit outta your emergency contact, because you never know when you’ll be the one missing a box jump or contracting bubonic plague.