The Fat Queen of Making Things Worse

 

Paul Radcliffe

 

         A Saturday afternoon in autumn. We are in a country at the far edge of the world. An elderly couple have arrived from an Eastern European country. They have come to visit their daughter and to see their grandson, fourteen months old, for the first time. Neither speak English.

        While the daughter is out, they are alone in the house. The grandfather collapses. The grandmother, not speaking English, does not know how to summon help. There is delay, compounded by the fact that they live in a rural area. The panic continues till the daughter arrives. The longer the down time the more likely death will follow. A harsh but true equation.

       A helicopter is sent, and the man is intubated at the scene. He has a cardiac arrest in flight, and one follows on another. He is in a deteriorating and ultimately irretrievable state. No rope can drag him back. Efforts—considerable efforts—are discontinued. The daughter has arrived, flushed and tearful.    She has been there, has been present through all the blood, controlled chaos and technology. The controlled futility. The first notes of a requiem are sounded in the resuscitation room. The daughter hears them. She is bordering on hysterical. She is distraught beyond any means to measure. She is taken out of the wrecked resus room, a shipwreck. She goes to a small family room (the latter is too small, lacks privacy, and like virtually everything else in the hospital, not fit for purpose.) She soon wanted to be back with her father, who had been moved from the resus room.

         In the corridor, she was held upright as her legs seemed about to give way. She was flushed, sobbing and profoundly shocked. Grief had taken her to the point where speech had fled. Such shuddering grief. There is a corridor that runs past the resus rooms.

        These days, there are always patients on trolleys lying there. The concept of beds in hospitals seems to have gone the same way as budget nights at the video hire store. Three for the price of one.

        Predictably, one of these was a morbidly obese—the tactful phrase—grotesque who had, allegedly, taken a Tylenol overdose (they hadn’t). The go-to option. Testing for the blood levels came back as zero. No doubt it was secondary to some pitiful ripple in what I imagine passes for a life. It would be a life if it were viewed through a high-definition electron microscope. Or, perhaps, the deck of the Starship  Enterprise, accustomed to the presence of alien life.

        With him, improbably, was an equally fat woman in a black beanie hat and a stained t-shirt. The shattered daughter walked past this woman, who had been witness to a horror that would last all her life—the fat woman, less than a yard away, said—sounding amused—

        ‘Did someone die then? Someone dead?’ Perhaps the sight had triggered her, though to the casual observer—there are few of those in Emergency—the most likely triggering word for this individual would be ‘doughnut.’ Or ‘fries.’

         The woman on the trolley looked faintly puzzled and continued to stare into the distance. She would have been puzzled by anything more complex than unwrapping a Mars Bar. The daughter was taken down long corridors to the mortuary. The practice is to take the deceased there, where the staff try to restore some aesthetics and dignity. Both of these are sunk without trace in major resuscitation. Successful or otherwise.

        Meanwhile, the daughter is left in a sparsely furnished lounge with faded watercolours and armchairs. After leaving her, someone later went back to check on her. Her husband had arrived, obviously shocked. Poignantly, the two- year-old grandson was there. The child sat on the carpet, crashing cars, his toys littered on the floor. A day of life changing sadness that he would not remember.

       The point to take from this cameo was this. It may be made into a training film. Don’t react to the fat tactless idiots. Hold onto your mouthful of thermonuclear proportions. The reason is that it distracts from immediate and pressing responsibility. Such restraint can be a cause for regret though. No one cares a toss about them or their feeble attempts at a life. You should care about a shocked woman. They had further distressed a visibly bereaved daughter, and were too careless or stupid or both to realize it.          Maybe that is what being professional so often amounts to. Keeping a shut mouth when confronted by morons 101. Had any of the Emergency Room staff read her particular horoscope,—'today you will make bereavement worse for someone, a good day for travel plans,' there is no doubt that the grotesque would have grunted her way to a complaint and subsequently, a lawyer’s office. Probably on all fours—these are liberally advertised all over the department for the use of the Eternally Discontented. I have suggested—as a matter of priority—that the Fat Queen of Making Things Worse should be provided with crayons in a selection of colors. In the event of her meeting the bereaved in any context, eating the crayons should provide an interval of distraction. If not, a gentle removal to Roswell. A family reunion and as far as possible from ER. Sometimes you just know when it is the right thing to do.

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         Paul Radcliffe is an Emergency RN. In the past, he worked in an area where children were sometimes afflicted with sickness of Gothic proportions. Some are ghosts now. As a child he visited an aunt in a haunted farmhouse. This explains a lot. Paul has worked in a variety of noisy places unlikely to be on anyone’s list of holiday destinations. He is also a highly suggestible subject for any cat requiring feeding and practicing hypnosis.

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          Bernice Holtzman’s paintings and collages have appeared in shows at various venues in Manhattan, including the Back Fence in Greenwich Village, the Producer’s Club, the Black Door Gallery on W. 26th St., and one other place she can’t remember, but it was in a basement, and she was well received. She is the Assistant Art Director for Yellow Mama.