The police station devolved into chaos because a ninety-four-year-old woman had fainted. Senior Constable Kettunen thought at first that his client had died on his office floor. He bent uncertainly over her to look for signs of life, and when he could see that she was breathing, however weakly, he called the department assistant, who berated him for not immediately calling the emergency services. An eternity was spent waiting for the emergency services to answer, and after that Constable Kettunen was asked a slew of questions that he couldn’t answer. He got testy, at which point emergency services got testy because Constable Kettunen was the seventy-seventh caller in a row who’d had the nerve to get annoyed, even though the emergency-services worker was just doing her job as well as she could, based on what she’d learned at training camp.
Constable Kettunen finally lost his temper and started bellowing into the phone in such a loud voice that Anna-Liisa appeared at the door to witness the scene, looking angry. She grabbed the phone from him and started shouting orders at the emergency service centre in no uncertain terms, and the call ended quickly.
‘An ambulance is on the way,’ she said grimly and ordered Constable Kettunen to fetch some water.
The old lady lying on the floor revived, drank a little water, and was then able to sit up with her friend’s help. Constable Kettunen stood helplessly beside them, glancing nervously at the clock, not knowing what to do in a situation such as this, other than complain afterwards that it took too long for an ambulance to get to the police station. The department assistant came to the door to scold him, and soon half the department was there watching as the ambulance crew carried a half-dead woman out of his office on a stretcher.
‘Well done, Siiri,’ Anna-Liisa said in the ambulance, squeezing her hand tightly. Her red hat was askew, her hair dishevelled, her aspect agitated. Siiri’s other hand had an IV connected to it and the ambulance man was bustling about efficiently in the tiny space.
‘She’s conscious,’ he said, but Siiri didn’t bother to introduce herself because she’d learned by now that ambulance crews didn’t waste their time with polite niceties. ‘Take her to the retirement home!’
The ambulance drove down Mannerheimintie at high speed with the siren blaring, as if Siiri was in mortal danger and they were rushing to save her life before it was too late.
‘Why do you have the siren on?’ Siiri asked.
‘For amusement. It’s more fun this way.’
Siiri thought it was scandalous, disrupting traffic like that. She was ashamed, embarrassed and upset. No doubt she would be getting a bill for this joyride. What a waste of money.
Chapter 49
After May Day, a tremendously fat seventy-two-year-old woman who got around in a wheelchair and never even said hello moved into Irma’s apartment. The name on the door was Vuorinen, but no one was sure what the woman’s first name was. Nurses were running to the apartment day and night to turn Mrs Vuorinen, a task which always required at least two girls, so with all her care needs she was a significantly more lucrative placement for the Loving Care Foundation and Virpi Hiukkanen’s agency than Irma had been.
Irma’s affairs had, in the meantime, grown more complicated. She was gradually recovering from the installation of her titanium hip but had now been transferred to the Kivelä Hospital Trauma Therapy Unit. There wasn’t much to recommend the hospital except that it was on Sibeliuksenkatu, which was a street with a lovely name.
‘It’s part of the homecoming process,’ Anna-Liisa said. ‘But it doesn’t seem to be a simple matter.’
‘It certainly isn’t,’ Siiri said. ‘Irma doesn’t even have a home!’
Anna-Liisa had been to visit Kivelä Hospital to quiz the staff and had refused to leave until they’d given her a pile of brochures on the care recommendations of Irma’s multi-professional team, including questions for loved ones, monitored exercise, and a home-evaluation system based on a scale of designated performance measurements.
Anna-Liisa read it aloud in her formal style: ‘An elderly person’s physical abilities can be weakened by even a short stay in the hospital. Older people have a small homeostatic reserve and often have other accompanying illnesses as well.’
‘I’m sorry, a small what?’
‘Don’t interrupt. Those responsible for the care and treatment of these illnesses can exacerbate the atrophy of a patient’s physical capacities. The hospital environment and prolonged bedrest can also contribute to complications.’
‘Good Lord. And I thought that you went to the hospital to get better!’
‘I’m not done yet.’
They felt sorry for poor Irma, being put through the mill like this. Who would have guessed that coming home from the hospital could be a life-threatening procedure associated with loneliness, insecurity and fear? According to the brochure, going home from the hospital was a traumatic event because the hospital was a protective environment – a claim no doubt connected with the fact that the person who wrote the brochure worked at the hospital.
‘There certainly seem to be plenty of traumas and risks involved. And to think that at the end of the war they just tossed the men from the front out to rebuild society and pay back all the war reparations. The only assistance they got was from the state-owned alcohol store,’ said Anna-Liisa when she got to the end of the brochure. She was so angry she couldn’t speak for a moment and just slapped the flyer down on the edge of the table.
‘Isn’t this the fifth hospital Irma’s been to for one broken hip?’ Siiri asked, to make the tapping stop. ‘Did you read that article in the paper about hospital tourists?’
‘The term is medical tourist. They use it to refer to sick people from other countries who come here to get treatment, not patients like Irma, who go from hospital to hospital. But listen to this!’
Anna-Liisa plunged into another brochure, as if they were tremendously entertaining.
‘The patient should be seen as a results-oriented agent in his or her own rehabilitation process.’ She was silent for a moment, shook her head, and looked hopeless. ‘Just think. Even I, a veteran language and literature teacher, find it harder and harder nowadays to understand the language.’
For an elderly patient to be allowed to go home, she had to pass certain tests that sounded so nonsensical that it made them laugh. The patient had to undergo such things as naming the parts of the body, and self-esteem reinforcement through touch. Perhaps this was a positive development. Siiri had once had a friend in hospital who’d been anaesthetized and prepped for surgery before they discovered that she was the wrong patient for the surgery being performed, and she’d simply been whisked out onto the street to wonder where she was.
‘That method of sending a patient home is altogether too swift,’ Siiri said. ‘What they’re doing with Irma is thorough, at least.’
‘We have to intervene somehow,’ Anna-Liisa said, turning serious. ‘What dignity is there in quizzing an old person about parts of her own body? And what good will all these silly procedures do you if, in the meantime, your home is being taken away from under your nose? Is this just a matter of providing employment for young people? Do they need so many professionals deciding every little thing? Common sense has been lost from the world, it seems to me.’
All this foolishness started to make Siiri so angry that she got up off the bed and warmed some blood pancakes on the stove. They were perhaps no longer quite fresh, but when you put lots of melted butter and lingonberry jam on them they still tasted good. While they ate, they chatted about how people used to scrape the mould off bread, or even jam, a thick green layer of it, and just throw it in the slop bucket and eat the rest with a good appetite, and no one ever got sick.
‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,’ Anna-Liisa said, and she would have liked a glass of red wine, but Siiri didn’t have any.
‘In that case I’ll go over to Onni’s. He has an alcohol cabinet,’ Anna-Liisa announced as she wiped up the last of the jam from her plate and dashed
out of the door in her spring hat. She’d taken to wearing it even indoors these days, which, of course, was perfectly acceptable for a woman of refinement.
Chapter 50
Siiri’s great-granddaughter’s boyfriend Tuukka had noticed on his computer that a private ambulance company had billed Siiri eighty-seven euros thirty cents for urgent transport. He sounded very worried on the phone, which wasn’t like him. He was usually so businesslike.
‘I just had a fainting spell while I was out,’ Siiri said, not daring to tell him about being questioned by the police, or about her crime. ‘The silly ambulance men kept the siren on for no reason at all and, of course, with the siren on it costs more. The whole thing was unnecessary, for heaven’s sake.’
Tuukka had some experience with ambulance charges and explained that the more unnecessary the trip, the more it cost.
‘The patient pays. If you don’t need treatment, as apparently happened in this case, it costs more than taking a taxi. It’s big business nowadays, transporting the sick.’
Siiri was astonished, but she believed him, because he was a very conscientious boy and always got to the bottom of things. It seemed that city ambulances took care of the most urgent cases and the rest were left for private firms who could charge whatever they liked.
‘But I didn’t order the ambulance! I was lying unconscious and somebody else called emergency services. Why should I be punished for that? Is somebody trying to get rich off picking up sick people?’
‘Of course they are,’ Tuukka said calmly. But there was another reason he had called. He had found out that Mika Korhonen was now Siiri’s advocate.
‘Do you understand what that means?’ he asked, as if Siiri were a child, or slow-witted. Tuukka thought that appointing an advocate was practically the same thing as putting yourself under guardianship, like voluntarily signing yourself up for the poorhouse.
‘You said it. This retirement home is a poorhouse.’
‘No, that’s not what I meant. If you have an advocate, it means you’re not capable of handling your own affairs.’
‘I’m not capable of it. That’s why you’re taking care of my bank account and making sure Virpi Hiukkanen doesn’t bleed it dry.’
‘Right, and now you want Mika Korhonen to take care of all your affairs. I know his type, and if I were you, I wouldn’t trust him. But it’s your decision, of course. And I also called to ask if you want me to transfer your Internet banking rights to him. You seem to be getting along without my help now that you’ve found your own Hell’s Angel.’
This hadn’t occurred to Siiri. The whole advocate issue had come as a sort of surprise to her and she herself hadn’t been that thrilled with the idea. She should have told Tuukka about it and asked his advice. He was almost a relative, after all, and a university man, and he had good reason to be hurt by Siiri thoughtlessly acting behind his back. She didn’t really know Mika at all. What did she know about him? That he was a cook and a taxi driver and was born a couple of years before she retired. But did he have a family? Where was he born, who were his relatives, where did he live? He never talked about himself or his own life.
Tuukka said that Mika had filed a report at the magistrate’s office, and now Siiri was so frightened that she almost felt faint. She couldn’t bear any more dealings with the police. What was she being dragged into?
‘Don’t worry. He’s just filed as your advocate. Otherwise it wouldn’t be official. There’s a guardianship office there where they keep track of these things.’
‘A guardianship office? That sounded like exactly what Tuukka was talking about, as though Siiri had been declared fit for the poorhouse. A guardianship used to be a horribly shameful thing, like being a halfwit. That’s what Irma had said, too – the village idiot. But nowadays they positively recommended that old people appoint an advocate. They’d had even had a presentation on it at Sunset Grove. There were so many old people in Finland whose relatives had forgotten them, people who needed a trusted person to make decisions in case they fell down and hit their head and had a cerebral haemorrhage and couldn’t remember their blood type. If you didn’t appoint an advocate yourself, you might end up having some unknown city official as your advocate. Virpi Hiukkanen had made an announcement, volunteering to be the advocate for residents at Sunset Grove. Siiri hadn’t gone to that lecture, but Anna-Liisa had sat through the whole thing and taken notes so it was one more thing she knew all about. And Mika was, after all, Anna-Liisa’s advocate, too.
‘So should I give Mika your bank information?’ Tuukka asked again. There was a sound of clicking computer keys in the background. He was, it seemed, beginning to worry about Siiri, an old woman who didn’t understand her own affairs and had to have everything explained to her twice.
‘I’m sorry, Tuukka. I didn’t mean to offend you,’ Siiri said, and asked if he would continue to be her personal bank-business person as long as she was still alive. Tuukka agreed, the wonderful boy, no longer sounding annoyed, and ended the call by wishing her well.
Chapter 51
Irma was enjoying her four-person room at the Kivelä Hospital Trauma Therapy Unit for Geriatric Assessment and Rehabilitation tremendously. She had started to develop a routine for adjusting to a new hospital and she had quickly got to know her room-mates. Kivelä was the fifth hospital where she was the oldest patient in the room, sort of like the oltermanni, the old village alderman.
‘Or is that only men? And Oltermanni cheese?’
The hospital was built in the 1930s, but it had been remodelled several times since then. The ground-floor lobby looked like it had been designed by some Alvar Aalto worshipper, with a broad staircase and terracotta floor tiles.
‘Do you know, I found a sign downstairs that had a twenty-six-letter word on it,’ Siiri said.
‘No! What was it?’
‘It was . . . hmm. I can’t remember now. It was a very complicated medical term.’
Irma could move on her own now, and was able to get around quite well with a Zimmer frame, although her progress was still slow and unsteady. She was eager to go on her first circuit of the hospital and look for Siiri’s word.
‘We can get some coffee while we’re out. There’s a cafeteria next to the stairs.’
Siiri helped her to her feet, which wasn’t much trouble because Irma was so thin and had more energy than before. She took firm hold of the Zimmer frame and started pushing herself forward.
‘It’s peculiar when your head and your feet aren’t going at the same tempo. But singing helps. I sing with my physical therapist – my father was a soldier, young and handsome, too . . . and voilà, my feet get marching. The main thing is not to end up in a wheelchair. That would be horrible.’
It was a long way from Irma’s room to the lift and another complicated trip from the lift to the cafeteria. But they weren’t in any hurry. They found a bronze plaque on the wall that said that President Ryti had spent his last years at Kivelä Hospital.
‘In other words, he died here. I don’t see how that’s such a great honour for a hospital,’ Irma snorted. She started to turn her Zimmer frame, with some difficulty. Once she’d got herself facing the right direction she lifted her gaze to the door across the hall.
‘Omahoitotarvikejakelupiste!’ she said, overjoyed. Self-care supply distribution point! ‘There’s your word! Wait, let me count.’
Irma’s soprano singing voice echoed gloriously as she counted the letters, crowing and laughing. She noticed that next to the Omahoitotarvikejakelupiste there was an apuvälinelainaamo, assistive-device loan centre, but to her disappointment the word had only seventeen letters.
They admired the lobby and thought Kivelä was a very nice hospital, the most pleasant one in Helsinki, so far. Irma thought the physical therapists at Kivelä were better than the ones at Laakso, but the food was worse, and the beds were awful. The other patients in her trauma therapy unit were a very colourful bunch; among them were a few recovering from serious brain infarcti
ons and their behaviour was unpredictable. One man slunk around the ward at night and came into women’s rooms and stood next to their beds. A lot of the patients were afraid of him, because it was unpleasant to wake up in the middle of the night and find a complete stranger standing there staring at you. There was a woman in Irma’s ward who was very confused and had a filthy mouth and thought Irma was a madame at a bordello.
‘Was I that confused in the Group Home?’
‘Well, you thought I was the nurse and you came out with all kinds of crazy things. You ordered me to pack a meal in a backpack and make sure I brought the alphabet book along, too.’
‘Like I did back when Kekkonen was president! Oh, how funny! But how could you stand me like that?’
‘Of course I could,’ Siiri said, carrying their coffee cups to a free table by the wall. ‘After all, I knew that you weren’t really dotty. It was all because of the medication.’
‘And that thought never occurred to my darlings.’
They sat down to enjoy their coffees and Irma started to talk about her dreams for going home. They actually called it the ‘homecoming process’, and Irma was supposed to meet several times with a group of people called the multi-professional team, as threatened in Anna-Liisa’s brochure. The group included a social worker, a physical therapist, a nurse and an occupational therapist, all of them cute young interns soon to graduate. The occupational therapist seemed to be like the activities directors at the retirement home. Irma had asked if she had to make an Easter chick before she could go home, but the girl had said that it would all become clear over time and that an activities director was a very different thing from an occupational therapist.
After a good beginning, however, Irma’s homecoming process had come to a halt because they couldn’t get hold of her family.
‘None of my darlings are answering the phone! They should be ashamed of themselves. I told the social worker that it was because all that appears on the little screen is an unknown number when you call from the hospital. My children have told me that you shouldn’t answer calls like that because they could be from anyone – a cold-caller or some other annoyance. Although sometimes they do have good things on offer. I once got a free Japanese kitchen knife and some Swiss wrinkle cream when I ordered a set of books, which I gave to my darlings as Christmas gifts. The nurse didn’t believe me. But let’s talk about something more fun. Tell me about Anna-Liisa’s spring fling!’
The Lavender Ladies Detective Agency: Death in Sunset Grove Page 24
