Strictly Confidential

by Roxy Jacenko

  Coming to in the back of an ambulance, I stared into the face of a squeaky-clean female ambulance officer, all swishy blonde hair and clear blue eyes and looking like she’d stepped out of a Lorna Jane sportswear brochure. I expected wheatgrass juice and goji berries to ooze out of her unclogged pores at any moment.

  She in turn stared back at my blackened eye. ‘Rough day?’ she asked as she fed an intravenous drip of something I guessed wasn’t alcohol into my arm.

  ‘Had better,’ I slurred. The jolting movement of the ambulance was doing nothing to stop my head spinning.

  ‘You’re lucky we got to you when we did,’ Lorna Jane went on. ‘I reckon you’ve got yourself a stomach ulcer there.’

  I stared at her incredulously. ‘A stomach ulcer?’

  ‘Looks a lot like it,’ Lorna Jane said perkily, her shiny blonde ponytail bouncing in time with the bumping of the ambulance.

  ‘Ugh,’ I groaned in reply.

  ‘Have you suffered any nausea or vomiting lately?’ the ambo asked. ‘Or noticed any loss of appetite? Any weight loss?’

  Was Lorna Jane kidding? I worked in fashion. If I wasn’t seeing weight loss then I wasn’t looking in the right places. As for loss of appetite – sheesh, I hadn’t acknowledged hunger pains since the late 1990s. I wouldn’t recognise my appetite now if it bit me on the arse.

  ‘Uh, yeah that sounds vaguely familiar,’ I said by way of reply. Lorna Jane wrote this down diligently.

  I sat as still as I could to try to minimise the pain and to let the idea of a stomach ulcer settle. How the fuck did this happen? I wondered.

  ‘Any idea how this might have happened?’ Lorna Jane asked me, as if reading my thoughts.

  I bit back several sarcastic responses. This woman was a medical professional and I was in charge of nothing more animate than a YouTube clip of BMW Australian Fashion Week and yet she was asking me? My head slumped to my chest.

  ‘Okay,’ she continued. ‘Let’s see if you can help me out here. Do you drink?’ I nodded. ‘Smoke? Take hard drugs? Ever self-medicate?’

  At this I raised my head. ‘Yes. I self-medicate.’ I nodded again. ‘Although never more than six Nurofen in any one sitting.’

  The ambo dropped her clipboard.

  ‘I’m in PR,’ I added by way of explanation.

  When the ambo finally got her jaw to work her words were not exactly welcome. ‘You’re in PR, huh? Well, not for a while you’re not. A stomach ulcer is really serious. If it’s burst you might need immediate surgery, and even if it hasn’t, you certainly won’t be back on your feet again for weeks.’

  Weeks? I nearly fell off my stretcher. You’ve got to be kidding me, Lorna Jane. I couldn’t take weeks off work! Hell, I couldn’t take hours off work. I thought about the new Levi’s account I was pitching for tomorrow morning and the Schwarzkopf Most Beautiful Hair event I was organising for tomorrow night. Then there was Fashion Weekend Sydney the following night and the Coco Man of the Year Awards looming fast after that. Of course, that wasn’t to mention BMW Australian Fashion Week. I didn’t have time for this. There was nothing in my schedule about a stomach ulcer and I wasn’t having a bar of it.

  ‘Immediate surgery, you say? So, what time will I be done?’ As I reached for my BlackBerry, my IV drip wrenched out of my vein. Lorna Jane went into apoplexy so I offered her my drip.

  ‘I don’t think you understand! The surgery might be immediate but the recovery isn’t. You won’t be discharged from hospital this fortnight!’

  Sure, Lorna, whatever you say, I thought as I dialled the number for my one next-of-kin emergency phone call. ‘Em? It’s Jaz . . . An ambulance . . . No, I’m fine. Just collecting emergency services experiences today . . . No, not for a campaign. Look, can you do me a favour? Can you postpone my meeting with Levi’s tomorrow morning? No, afternoon is fine. Say, 2 pm . . .’

  I shoved the IV line back in my arm, adjusted the bandage on my head and beamed a winning smile in the direction of Lorna’s disapproving glare.

  They came thick and they came fast. The sick, the wounded and the near-terminally drunk. They all staggered through the doors of the Prince of Wales Hospital that night until I was sure the sanitised, glaringly white Emergency Department was going to buckle under the weight of the wretched and collapse in a heap of broken limbs and ailing organs and crutches and sick bags and drug-fucked teenage girls from the Eastern Suburbs.

  A triage nurse looked me up and down. I groaned quietly in agony. ‘Jasmine Lewis?’ she asked. I nodded. ‘Suspected stomach ulcer, potentially burst,’ she said aloud to no one in particular as she scrawled the diagnosis on a medical form.

  ‘I’m sure it’s not that serious,’ I assured her, ignoring the stabbing pains in my abdomen. The nurse, in turn, ignored me. Apparently she didn’t care for my esteemed medical opinion. Not when she had at least half a dozen screaming, vomiting or swearing patients lined up behind me, all of whom had appeared in the short time since the ambulance had dropped me off. I had no idea ER was so popular. At least not the version without George Clooney. I clutched my stomach and scanned the room. There sure as hell were a lot of people here. I wished I’d brought some branded Queen Bee bottles of water with me. Nothing like a captive customer base, after all.

  ‘How bad is the pain, Jasmine?’ the nurse asked, her harried voice free of any signs of compassion.

  ‘It’s a ten on the Richter scale, nurse,’ I said, already planning my fast-track to the head of the queue and, from there, home and back to the comfort of my laptop.

  ‘Ten?’ the nurse confirmed, not looking up from her form.

  ‘Ten.’

  ‘Right, I’ve noted that down. Take a seat and a doctor will see you as soon as possible,’ she instructed.

  Take a seat? I pouted. Then lurched off to a row of nearby plastic chairs to wait. And wait. And wait.

  Several hours later I was still slumped in my seat and showing no signs of going anywhere fast. If my stomach ulcer hadn’t been burst when I’d arrived, it sure as hell would be soon, I thought grimly. Frustrated and near delirious with pain, I scrolled through my BlackBerry. Surely there was someone I could call to sort this out? I didn’t have time to wait in a queue any more than I had time to have a stomach ulcer. I should be hitting the office in just a few hours. The contacts list in my phone didn’t offer much by way of medical leg-up, however. Party planners, cake decorators, designers, couturiers, muses, fashion editors, beauty bloggers, the who’s who of the Sydney social scene. But not a surgeon to be seen. Someone in the row behind me vomited violently onto the floor. Oh, this really was beyond.

  Just as I was debating whether to take the spotty (and probably highly infectious) child beside me hostage and hold up the storeroom and medicate myself, a familiar voice called out from across the room. ‘Jazzy Lou?’

  My head snapped up. ‘Samantha Priest?’

  For the second time that evening, a blonde ponytail bobbed dizzyingly in front of me. Only this one was decidedly less squeaky clean than the one that greeted me in the ambulance. As was the person attached to it.

  ‘What in the bloody hell are you doing here, babe?’ she screeched affectionately, scuffing towards me across the lino, sick and dying people turning pale in her wake.

  ‘Er, I think I may have a stomach ulcer,’ I tried to say discreetly. The guy next to me shifted away in his chair as though he was sitting next to a leper. I looked pointedly at the spotty child in his lap.

  ‘Shit, eh?’ called Samantha. ‘That’s rooted.’

  Quite, I thought, idly wondering whether Samantha was here to have her excessive Australian vernacular gene removed. She seemed to have been born with more than her fair share.

  ‘And you?’ It seemed only polite to return the question. And much as the Emergency Department at POW Hospital was not where I would have chosen for
our rendezvous, I was glad to see her.

  ‘Had me stomach pumped. Again!’ She laughed at the folly of her situation. ‘One too many bourbon and cokes at Ravesi’s. LOL!’ she added. The remnants of charcoal skirting round her mouth suggested some other form of decontamination but I let it slide. Instead, I nodded like it happened to me all the time.

  And then I did the maths on that. ‘Let me get this straight: you’ve been to Ravesi’s, had time to get wasted, been through ER and had your stomach pumped. Already?’ I asked incredulously. ‘What time did you start drinking? Breakfast?’

  Samantha laughed and tugged at her cotton shift dress. Even in the middle of the night in ED, dressed only in beach wear, she still managed to look like a model. ‘Nah, babe. I didn’t get to Bondi till late. But I’ve got contacts here so they don’t make me hang around.’ She inclined her blonde head towards the queue of patients now snaked out the doors of Emergency.

  I sat up straighter in my plastic chair, sending shooting pains through my abdomen. ‘Contacts?’ I yelped.

  ‘Yeah, I slept with one of the registrars here. Cute guy but way too brainy for me. Like being stuck in an episode of Grey’s Anatomy.’

  I pulled myself out of my seat and clutched at Samantha’s arm. ‘Take me to him!’

  ‘Sure thing, babe. But I never thought you’d be one for sloppy seconds.’

  ‘The good news is the PUD in your duodenum is not perforated as suspected.’

  I squinted in concentration. Clearly the drugs had inhibited my ability to understand English because that last sentence didn’t make a whole heap of sense when received by my throbbing head.

  ‘Of course, the bad news is obviously that the diagnosis is a peptic ulcer, probably caused by NSAIDS or anti-inflammatory medications.’

  Nope, no good. Not a language I could understand. I stared in incomprehension at the registrar, who’d come to visit me the next day. No wonder Samantha Priest had had trouble with this guy. God knows what their pillow talk involved.

  I held my hand up to indicate he should stop talking. ‘Again?’ I requested.

  ‘You’ve got a stomach ulcer but the stomach ulcer hasn’t burst,’ he said flatly. ‘That was the upshot of the gastroscopy and the barium meal we gave you this morning.’

  Oh, the barium meal. That I understood. How could I forget the revolting chalky goo I’d so recently had to force down. It was the first square meal I’d eaten in weeks.

  ‘So,’ the reg went on, ‘I’m recommending a short-term course of antibiotics and a long-term course of proton-pump inhibitors. Plus close observation in hospital for at least the next few days.’

  I gasped.

  ‘And lay off the Nurofen tabs,’ he added categorically.

  No Nurofen? Incarcerated for at least the next few days? Fuck, it was like a kibbutz in here. And this reg was the head zealot. What had Samantha Priest ever seen in him? Other than his willingness to support queue jumpers in ED, that was. A handy perk if you got wasted as often as Samantha did, I guessed.

  I rolled over haughtily in bed, grabbing uselessly at my hospital gown in a vain attempt to achieve some semblance of dignity.

  ‘Nice arse, babe!’

  WTF! I nearly toppled off the narrow hospital bed in shock as I scrambled to cover my cavorting cheeks. Weren’t there laws against a lack of doctor/patient decorum?

  ‘So are you hot to trot now or what?’ Samantha Priest bounded into the room, her appraisal of my anatomy arriving before she did.

  ‘No, she’s not,’ interjected Doctor Fun.

  I couldn’t tell who was annoying me more, him or her.

  ‘And she won’t be for several days,’ he added.

  I let out a sigh of frustration.

  ‘Oh, too bad, huh?’ Samantha consoled, then in the next breath: ‘So, are you ready to split, sweet cheeks?’

  I grabbed at my hospital gown again.

  Samantha laughed. ‘Not you, Jazzy Lou!’ and she slipped a hand under the registrar’s scrubs before manhandling him out the door.

  Over the next few days I made life hell for the poor nurses assigned to care for me, refusing to lie down and take my prescribed medicine quietly.

  Instead, I moved the Queen Bee offices into Ward E of Prince of Wales Private Hospital.

  ‘No, no, that’s not enough,’ I blasted down the phone. ‘We need at least double that amount of imported limes and we need them before Friday.’

  A pause while the person on the other end responded was punctuated by the beeping of some complex-looking machine to my right.

  ‘No, I won’t take limes from the Riverina! This is a Hawaiian-themed event and I want my limes to come from the North Pacific!’ Honestly.

  I punched the red phone symbol on my BlackBerry, nearly reefing my IV line out at the same time. The machine beside me beeped angrily. Maybe it was a heart-rate monitor after all . . .

  ‘Imbeciles!’ I huffed to Em, who sat perched on the end of my hospital bed, iPad in hand. Em busied herself reading publicity schedules.

  We had less than two weeks to go now until the VIP (and Hawaiian-themed) Coco Man of the Year Awards event. And not much longer until Allison Palmer’s show at BMW Australian Fashion Week. I needed to haggle over limes like I needed a proverbial hole in the head. Or a literal one in the stomach. Anya, Alice and Lulu wandered into the room, fresh from an excursion to the hospital canteen.

  ‘It was dire,’ announced Alice, flopping onto the empty bed beside me. My BlackBerry rang again loudly just as Em’s mobile buzzed and yet another delivery of flowers arrived at the door.

  ‘Lulu, can you get those?’ I indicated the enormous bunch of gerberas blocking the doorway, a pair of delivery-man legs sticking out below. Lulu nodded and turned to the door. ‘And remember,’ I directed while picking up my ringing BlackBerry, ‘cut the stems pre putting them in water. And make sure you add some sugar to the water. And one colour per vase – never mix them, okay? Hello, Jasmine Lewis speaking . . .’

  Lulu struggled under the weight of my OCD directions as she grappled with the flowers.

  A nurse squeezed past her and entered the room, muttering, ‘I thought this was POW not QB HQ,’ to no one in particular, which was lucky because no one in particular was listening.

  ‘Leila, hi!’ I enthused down the phone. It was Leila Graham, editor of Coco, wanting to talk turkey about our kitten of a Man of the Year Award winner: Kurt Simmons. Kurt was an e-entrepreneur whose main claim to fame was dreaming up an online adoption process for rescued pooches. And while the women of Australia may have chosen him as their fave eligible bachelor, Kurt certainly wasn’t going to win us any friends in the press. I mean, how the hell was any self-respecting journo going to fill a feature interview with Kurt Simmons? Ask him about his Boy Scout badges? Reveal his heady anecdotes of helping little old ladies across the road? Tap his boringly reliable phone conversations to his mum each Sunday night? Hardly the stuff of news headlines.

  Em pulled up Kurt’s publicity strategy on the tablet in front of her and swung it around for me to read while I spoke to Leila. It was a short document.

  ‘Okay, what we need is a new, improved bad-boy angle on Kurt,’ I began. ‘The media have done the “protector of parentless poodles” story to death. We need to give them something hot, something risqué, something they never knew about Kurt before. The Kurt I’m thinking of is a little less Von Trapp and a little more Cobain.’

  ‘Fab, babe, I love it,’ interjected Leila. ‘But how do you plan to do that?’

  I paused. ‘Sit Kurt next to one very glamorous but very unlucky-in-love social-pages junkie at the event and sparks – then headlines – are sure to fly.’

  ‘Genius,’ Leila purred. ‘Absolute genius, Jazz. Do you have someone in mind? I can’t wait to see that in action.’

  Neith
er could I. If only I could get out of this bloody hospital in time to witness it.

  The nurse, who was still fussing around my room, chose this point in our conversation to inform me, in no uncertain terms, that I should get off the phone. She did this by removing said phone from my ear and hanging up on Leila for me.

  ‘Hey –’ I started indignantly, but the nurse wasn’t having a bar of it.

  ‘Jasmine Lewis,’ she instructed, ‘you need to make a few lifestyle modifications if you want to avoid ending up in Emergency again. Lifestyle modifications like stressing less and sleeping more and,’ she reefed open the top drawer of my bedside table and swiped my latest box of Nurofen Plus, ‘kicking your ibuprofen habit fast.’ I sulked as she made her way around the room, throwing curtains open and throwing Bees out into the corridor. ‘You can’t expect to recover if you don’t give your body time to rest!’

  I paused to consider my options. The way I saw it I had a pretty clear choice: a) Put my Miu Miu-shod feet up. Perhaps book myself into some exey, unsexy, organic, hippie spa retreat and drink coconut water till I looked like an extra on Cast Away; or b) Put my Miu Miu-shod foot down, continue to work my arse off and maybe – just maybe – I’d pull off the best damned Coco Man of the Year Awards and BMW Fashion Week show this town had ever seen and assure Queen Bee’s survival in the process.

  Of course, there was a third, less appealing option involving a burst stomach ulcer, some emergency surgery and a slow and painful recovery. But best not to dwell on that here.

  Fact was, stomach ulcer or no stomach ulcer, I wasn’t about to bite the dust for anybody.

  Daphne Guinness, celebrated style icon and kooky aunt of the fashion fraternity, once said, ‘I don’t approach fashion; fashion approaches me!’ I felt much the same way about disaster. We were beginning to look tighter than Sass and Bide, disaster and I. Always clutching one another’s arms and finishing one another’s sentences whenever we appeared in public. So now, having been beaten up by an employee and knocked down by a stomach ulcer, I was pretty much ready for disaster and me to part ways.