by Leah Hazard
‘Tina …?’ I ventured. ‘Are you still here?’
‘Mmm.’
I searched my brain for a topic that would engage her, that would keep her in the room. And then I saw the old yellow dog lead hanging limply over the head of the bed.
‘Do you have any dogs of your own, Tina?’
She nodded, then grimaced and raised an icy, white hand to her neck.
‘What are their names?’
Tina opened her eyes, looked at me, thought hard. ‘I have Poodle called Marco, and spaniel called Bibi. And also I have … black, no, brown dog, called …’ She closed her eyes again, pressed them tight in concentration, then looked back at me apologetically. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t remember.’
It was alarming to see that even though Tina’s body had been coaxed back from the brink of collapse, the haze of disease still clouded her mind. For a ‘dog person’, to forget the name and colour of your pet is akin to forgetting the identities of your children – a sure sign of cognitive compromise. I scrambled in my pocket for my phone, pressed a button and the lock screen flashed up: a photo of my Boston Terrier wearing a daft pink tartan tie after a visit to the groomer. It crossed my mind that this level of sharing was highly unprofessional, and I began to play out a Single White Female scenario in my mind, wherein Tina embarked on a relentless stalking campaign, lurking outside my house every evening in a pink tartan necktie – but as she squinted and focused her eyes on the image, Tina smiled broadly, brilliantly.
‘Ahh, your dog is lovely,’ she said, and for the first time since she’d set foot in that small, windowless room in the clinic, I felt as though I was actually meeting the real Tina. Amidst the drips, wires, machines and monitors, for a brief moment we were two sentimental dog owners, cooing over my ‘fur baby’.
The door opened. It was Raymond, stethoscope flung round his neck, cheeks flushed, scrub trousers dragging low enough to reveal the top of his pink-and-blue-striped boxer shorts. I wondered if his mother still bought his underwear. He grinned and beckoned for me to come outside. I squeezed Tina’s hand, pulled the curtain closed behind me and followed Raymond out to the desk.
‘They’ve got a bed for Tina over the way …’
‘That’s great, Raymond.’ I was truly, genuinely, physically relieved to hear that soon Tina would be the responsibility of a team whose staff were more accustomed to dealing with critically ill patients.
‘And guess what? I got three matches on Tinder while I was cannulating your patient. Fucking yassss!’ He raised his hand to high-five me. Well, it would have been rude to leave him hanging, and he did just help to save my patient’s life. I high-fived him, low-fived him, and we may have even shared a little fist-bump before he shuffled back to the desk.
One of the most difficult things about Triage is that we seldom get to see the end of our patients’ stories. As the name of the unit suggests, they come in for assessment, get triaged to the appropriate department, have a baby or get sent home. Whatever happens, happens, while our phone keeps ringing and the waiting room keeps filling up. Over the next few weeks, I would use any spare moment to search for Tina’s lab results on our online system, curious about her outcome, wondering if she would ever remember the names of all her dogs, or even see them again, or stride through the woods with a flush in her cheeks as the pack yomped happily through the trees ahead. As days passed and the lab results rolled in one by one, the diagnosis was confirmed: influenza, complicated by pneumonia. A double dunter, as they say. So Raymond and I had both been right.
Some time later, as Triage began to bloom with early springtime babies, Tina returned to our desk. She looked radiant, powerful and strong as she breathed through wave after wave of contractions. I would barely have recognised her if I hadn’t seen her name on the front of her notes. As it was, she didn’t recognise me at all.
I took Tina’s arm and guided her gently towards bed five, a few steps from where she’d been during that terrifying time in December, and I smiled to myself as she made the unmistakeable sounds of a woman in the advanced stages of labour. A torrent of Polish expletives spilled from her mouth as a mighty surge rolled through her body; she was brimming with life in all of its brutal glory despite the spectre of death that had lingered at her back. As she raged and roared, I said a silent prayer in praise of whatever merciful force had kept Tina safe. I thanked the Oracle, I thanked Martha, and I even thanked Raymond.
Notes on Being from Somewhere Else
My father has this bag.
He keeps it in a safety deposit box in the bank in my home town; a squat, red-brick building that sits between a pharmacy and a hair salon. There are other things in the box – a life’s worth of papers and trinkets – but the bag has an almost magical quality in spite of its homespun appearance. I suppose you could call it a primitive travel pouch, an early ancestor of the Velcro-pocketed bum bags sold on revolving display stands at airports and train stations. But my father’s bag has no Velcro and no clever pockets; it’s just a little sack, hand-sewn from two squares of burlap, now worn smooth from years of use, with a long, skinny strap. Big enough to hold a passport, a folded sheaf of bills, and perhaps a photograph or two, but small enough to be concealed under clothing, hidden from fellow travellers who share your route, but not your intentions.
The bag belonged to my father’s father, who wore it close to his body when he fled Ukraine in the early twentieth century. It wasn’t very popular to be Jewish in that time and place; your house was liable to be set alight in the night, your brothers and sisters cowering under the kitchen table. So my grandfather left when he was still young enough to make a new life somewhere else, and he took the bag, and he crossed a strange sea to Canada.
My mother doesn’t even have a bag. Her father, a young Czech lawyer with a promising career ahead of him, was warned by a neighbour one day that he was likely to be killed by invading Nazis the next. He disappeared by dawn, walking first out of the city he loved, then into the forest, then across the border into Poland, where friends awaited who could speed his safe passage to England. My mother’s mother was luckier in that her exodus from the same country began not on foot, but on a train. At just fourteen years old, she was waved off at the station by her parents, whose grim smiles belied the bone-deep knowledge that they would never see her again. No cases or bags remain from those desperate journeys – only the stories passed down in the safety deposit box of our family history.
So I’m 100 per cent refugee, although you would never know it. My skin is the right colour to pass as ‘White British’, although I often find myself ticking the ‘White Other’ box on questionnaires and applications. My voice has a socially acceptable accent, only the odd twang betraying traces of my most recent migration, from America to Britain, nearly twenty years ago. I fly under the radar, and when others comment on incomers with their odd ways and unappealing needs, I know that my blood is the same blood of those grandparents whose survival depended on the kindness of strangers – strangers who accepted their ways, and met their needs.
This history has not only given me an acute sense of gratitude to those faceless strangers, but a strange sense of kinship with the women who have fled war and persecution to end up in my care. I’ve met waves of immigrants from the world’s notorious hotspots of death and destruction, and when I read the stories and see the scars of these women, I’m compelled – perhaps naively – to acknowledge their stories, to soothe their scars, and maybe, in some small way, to repay the kindness that enabled my grandparents to survive and to thrive. In another life, it could have been me waving goodbye to my parents through a smoke-blackened window or cowering behind a tree as the boots of enemy soldiers snapped pine branches strewn on a dark forest floor. I look at my children, who have been raised in peace and comfort, and marvel that anyone could want them dead simply because of some tenuous link to race or religion; and yet, unless the forces of good in this world continue to triumph over the dark tides of hatred and bigotry, it could still
be so.
Of course, not every immigrant with a tale of woe has a heart of gold, and I don’t always get it right. I’ve spent honey-tongued hours at the bedside of a sorry-looking soul from far away, cooing over her pain, bringing her trays of sweet tea and biscuits, only to be told by another patient that the woman’s ‘sister’ was busy rifling through the filing cabinets in our office, filling her pockets with whatever goodies the NHS could provide. On another recent shift in the postnatal ward, I took a handover about a patient whose journey from a well-known war zone almost had me in tears. I fetched a jug of fresh water and approached the bed space with my most beatific smile.
‘Welcome, and congratulations,’ I purred, enunciating each word slowly and clearly in case she was still struggling with this new language. ‘Can I help you?’ She pointed to the brand-new mobile phone by her side, with its rose-gold, diamanté case, then to the woman cuddling a newborn in the opposite bed, and said in clear, virtually unaccented English, ‘This woman – she has iPhone charger?’
Sometimes, though, I meet a woman who truly has nothing: not a phone, or a word of English, or even a biscuit in her grumbling, grasping stomach. She doesn’t know it, but we have something in common. And I can help.
Pei Hsuan: I Have Carried This Story
There was someone in the waiting room who didn’t belong there.
It was a busy Monday morning in Triage, and the fire alarm had gone off just as a dozen patients had filed in to the department. Women of all colours, shapes and sizes lifted their heads and searched frantically for the source of the shrieking sound, like a startled flock of exotic birds, their magazines flapping to the floor. I peered at the fire system control panel with Betty and Madge, the other midwives for the day.
‘Ground-floor toilets,’ Betty mused, pointing to one of the flashing lights on the panel. ‘Some poor sod’s been rumbled having a fag. Never mind, I could do with one myself. Grab your coats, girls,’ she said, and headed for the door.
Madge and I pulled on our standard-issue navy fleeces and made a mental tally of the women in the department: this one with the black puffa coat and the three screaming toddlers; that one with the niqab and the Louis Vuitton handbag; the two identical twins, both pregnant, who were buttoning their bellies into identical red duffel coats.
‘Everybody out,’ called Madge, corralling the crowd through the double doors and into the corridor. ‘Let’s go and look at the pretty firemen,’ she added, winking back at me over her shoulder.
Fire alarms being an increasingly common occurrence within the hospital, Madge and I were more than familiar with this ritual. Midwives and auxiliaries were forever burning snacks in contraband toasters and forbidden George Foreman grills – such costly and disruptive accidents were the reason why only a select few departments had been granted the lesser-spotted, and much longed-for ‘Toaster Authorisation Form’. We marched into the frosty January morning along with dozens of other women who’d been hurried out of clinics and scans; the fire alarm screamed into the crisp blue sky as staff and patients mingled and chattered, waiting in giggly anticipation for the fire engine that arrived not long after. The engine’s doors opened and released a crew of firefighters who were in no particular hurry to run the gauntlet of a hundred hormonal females; there were the usual jokes about long hoses and fireman’s lifts as the men trudged past us to investigate. Ten minutes passed and by the time the firemen lumbered back out, grumbling about ‘another bloody waste of time’, the assembled crowd had begun to feel the chill: coats were drawn tight and scarves double-wrapped as we shuffled against each other to keep warm. The hospital boss appeared with a clipboard and started waving women back into the building as the fire truck rumbled away.
‘Who the hell is that?’ said Betty, as she ground out her furtively smoked cigarette under the toe of her battered black trainers.
‘Big Boss,’ replied Madge. ‘I’ve only ever seen her twice – once during another fire alarm, and once when they tried to sack me for too many sickies. Obviously,’ she said, grinning, ‘I’m still here.’
We plunged our hands into our fleece pockets and joined the herd of women moving back into the building. The door to the toilets next to the reception desk hung open, but there was no sign of a fire.
‘What was it?’ I asked Patience, one of the ward sisters who was ushering onlookers past the toilet door.
‘Someone was smoking crack; the firemen found the gear in the lavvy pan,’ she stage-whispered as she rolled her eyes. ‘Classy clientele.’
Once Betty, Madge and I had made it back to the desk, we surveyed the women who had resumed their positions in the waiting room, many of whom were now looking pointedly at their watches and huffing to each other about the delay and the cold.
‘Kayden, stop poking your sister’s eye!’ shouted the woman in the puffa to one of her toddlers, with little effect. The woman in the niqab clutched her Louis Vuitton closer to her chest, while the twins busied themselves taking selfies on matching iPhones. All present and correct, plus one.
While most of the women in the waiting room were still peeling off woolly layers as they settled back into their stiff plastic chairs, a young Chinese woman wearing only a faded green T-shirt, grey sweatpants and flip-flops hovered next to the vending machines by the door. She seemed unsure whether to cross the threshold into the department, and her eyes darted back and forth as she ran her hands nervously across her belly, which was just round enough to hold either an average-sized five-month fetus, or a severely stunted baby at full term. Her frame was slight and girlish, but there was a steeliness to her gaze and a grim set to her jaw, which made her age impossible to determine.
‘Who’s that?’ I asked Betty.
She looked up, then back down at the pile of case notes for the women who had phoned the department that morning and been invited in for assessment: Watson, McNee, Hirschberg, Al-Hamza, Khan, Khan and Willoughby. ‘Not here,’ she said. ‘No idea. But she looks right up your street.’ I had already developed a reputation within Triage for gravitating towards the vulnerable, the lost and, sometimes, the ever so slightly crazy. Betty knew my style, and was happy enough to leave these patients to me. ‘I’m with Watson,’ she said, and she called the first patient into the treatment area.
I walked over to the girlish figure by the door. She quaked slightly as I approached, as if she were fighting some inner impulse to run, but a competing, stronger urge compelled her to hold her ground. Even standing at what I hoped was a non-threatening distance, I could smell her: the sour, salty tang of the unwashed, and the ketotic, pear-drop breath of the hungry. On closer inspection, there were seams of dirt in the creases of her fingers, and the hem of her top was soiled and frayed.
‘Can I help you?’ I asked.
She squinted at me with intense concentration, searching my face for signs of trustworthiness or malice. After a long moment of scrutiny, she must have decided that she was satisfied with what she saw. Her body eased, her shoulders dropping fractionally, her jaw a bit less tense. She reached into the pocket of her sweatpants, withdrew a square of tightly folded paper, and extended her hand to me as if passing a baton.
I took the paper. It was as smooth as suede, the surface lightly furred from being fingered, clutched, grasped and stroked, the edges beginning to split from being folded and re-folded countless times. As I lifted a corner of the paper and began to open it out as carefully as I could, the woman stared with a stern, hawkish focus, like an archivist watching a bumbling researcher fumble with her most precious ancient text. The moment seemed to call for white cotton gloves and the hush of an oak-panelled library, not the clamour and cloying heat of the Triage waiting room.
As I gingerly unfolded the sheet, I could see that it was a piece of lined A4, the same kind my daughters used for their homework, but instead of sums or spelling tests, this paper was crammed from top to bottom with what I guessed were Mandarin characters. Some of it was written in pen, some in barely visible pencil, some in l
arge characters, some small, as if the author had added to the page at different times, in different moods, with whatever implement had been available. As I squinted at the page, I could decipher neatly printed numbers here and there among the scrawl – 2017, 2018 – and I wondered whether this paper represented some kind of chronology. Whatever it was, it was clearly precious to its bearer. I passed it back to her, and she carefully re-folded it until it was small enough to hide within her tightly clenched fist.
The woman spoke, then, in a language I didn’t understand – ni hao, or hello, was as far as my Mandarin went – and pointed to herself, then back at the sheet of A4. Her voice was as soft and ragged as the paper I had held in my hand, but there was an unmistakeable urgency to what she was saying.
As the waiting room continued to fill, and the phones rang noisily at the desk, I knew that this woman would need my undivided attention for the next hour; possibly for the rest of the morning. I could see Betty and Madge shuttling busily from the treatment room to the desk, ferrying urine samples, swabs and sheaves of paperwork back and forth. Soraya, the doctor, appeared at the desk, but disappeared again just as quickly when her pager went off with its urgent beeping. Triage was ‘going like a fair’, as we often said, and at times like these, all hands were required to keep the department running smoothly. However, there was also the tacit agreement among staff that, sometimes, one urgent patient took precedence over three others with less pressing concerns. This hierarchy of need was the true meaning of triage, and while the woman in front of me might not have been haemorrhaging, rigouring with fever or pushing out a baby, everything about her cried out for help, including – I felt – the indecipherable scrawl I had held in my hand.
