Snapshot: My 24 Hours in A&E
“It’s that serious?”
“Yes” said the emergency doctor over the phone.
“Oh”
“You need to go to A&E right now”.
“Now?”
“Yes. Right now.”
A woman was bleeding in front of me. We both stared at the red lifeless puddle, this strange piece of her, until it was cleaned up with hurried arms and blue paper. It left an orange stain. The man behind me groaned, then talked, then groaned. He spoke to his family on the phone, but no one was allowed to visit us because we were on the covid ward.
10.45pm. By the time I arrived in A&E I had been vomiting every few hours. I’d not been able to keep food down for two days, nor water down for one. It meant the daily medication I took was leaving my system. It meant that I hadn’t been able to sleep. I was sent, alone, to a waiting room for people who might be infected with covid. I sat in the only seat available in a blank room.
I have no memory of the colour of the walls, or the chairs, or the floor. Hospitals seem designed to be as indistinct as possible. But I do remember how I felt; the resignation, the frustration, the amazement that I could still vomit at all.
There was nothing to look at but the walls and the people. The man next to me had the foresight to bring his iPad and I imagined that he was a genius. He watched a show which rated animals from best to worst (this diminished his genius somewhat). Even so, he had entertainment and I did not. So, I listened to a show about animals that attacked humans. I wanted the goose to win ‘most formidable’. I imagined the show producers patting themselves on the back once they realised that they could just jam random animal names together with a theme picked from a hat and still get decent ratings. I pictured them nodding and laughing as the bewilderment of their audience rose. Eventually, the vehement shouts of “no! surely not! why is the octopus even included!” would become the only intended upshot of their shows.
Once the show was over the man played a recording of what I assumed was Catholic Mass. There was, at least, a priest and a bit of music. The tone shift from angry geese to the Catholic Church didn’t seem too jarring to me, perhaps because I readily accepted distraction, any distraction, with gratitude. I wondered if listening to Mass would make a God that I didn’t believe in listen to my whispered pleas to be ok. He didn’t.
At 11:30pm a nurse interrupted our group’s patient silence to triage us. There were five of us. The video man, the angry waiting man, the sick teenager, their dad, and me. My chair was starting to hurt. The wait was starting to hurt. I was still vomiting regularly. A man near me drank some water, he glugged it down like it was a perfectly ordinary thing to do. It felt unjust. I stared at his water and felt tired. The nurse took our blood pressure (fine) and asked us some medical questions: “Yeah, I have a lot of things wrong with me,” I quipped after listing the multiple things which have gone wrong with my body. The nurse offered silence when I had hoped for a smile. I shuffled back to my painful chair.
The woman at the end of the row got up and walked around until she found a nurse. She did this regularly. The nurse reminded her, again, that there was a long wait. No kidding. She told him that she had been there for hours. “Ah,” the nurse said, “but there’s a long wait.” The woman said it was outrageous to pay for the privilege of not being seen. He reminded her, again, of the long wait and she sat back down.
The teenager next to me slept while their dad watched over them. Whenever the teenager woke up their dad crouched down to their eye-level and patted their knee. Each pat was a little piece of love and worry. He spoke to his child in a language I didn’t understand, and I felt glad that the sick child was not alone.
As I stared at the wall the woman at the end of the row got up again and asked a member of staff whether the wait would be much longer. She raised her voice. She had been waiting for six hours. I’d been waiting for three. I wondered if I would have shouted if I were her. Then I realised I would be her; I would be in A&E overnight. Eventually the woman sat down on her painful seat. The next time she got up she shouted, louder this time, about how long she had been waiting, then she walked out of the waiting room. I realised that she, like me, was bargaining with time. I’d put a certain amount of hours into waiting. If I left, then I would have turned those hours into wasted time. So, I stayed, and I vomited again. I listened to the conversations near me, but they were too fleeting to attach myself to.
Midnight. I had thought that being triaged meant each of us would be moved soon, but we stayed where we were. The woman next to me suggested that we had been forgotten. I nodded in agreement, then got up to vomit.
It was 1am, then 2am, then 3am, then 4am, then 5am.
I was moved to a private room at 6am. It had a curtain, and a sink, and a bed. I felt rich. I sat in the plastic chair next to the bed because I felt too sick to lie down. I felt hopeful despite this because I thought I would see a doctor soon. I was dehydrated, so I knew I could be treated quickly. I only needed anti-nausea meds, food, and a drip to bring me back to life. I knew it would take about an hour. I waited.
I moved my curtain just enough to see the corridor in front of me. I saw the two doctors who had been talking to patients move past my room. I was not a priority, I knew this, I understood why. The more I vomited, the more worried I became. It had been hours. The doctor who had sent me here said it was important that I go to A&E. If it was important hours ago, then surely it was more important now. A nurse encouraged me to rest on the bed. I lay down, felt sick, then sat on the bed as a compromise. I wanted to sleep, but hospitals are noisy places, so I didn’t sleep. I shut my eyes and watched the bright hospital lights as they danced over my eyelids.
8am. The prospect of vomiting again didn’t bother me anymore. It was a routine now; I sipped a little water, vomited, sipped a little more, vomited. My mouth felt dry. I punched the bed with a weak fist, and it hurt my hand. I shouted a little, just a quick little scream to help me feel less helpless. It didn’t help. But the scream made me realise that I was angry. I was angry because I was entirely in the hands of an utterly broken system. Everyone in the hospital, patients, and staff, had an atmosphere of exhaustion. Of being stretched to their limit, and then stretched some more.
I walked up to a desk with two people were sitting at it, talking.
“Hi. Do you know how longer it’ll be?”
“A few hours at least.”
I felt tears build. Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry.
“I came in for dehydration.”
I cried.
“We know. It’ll be a few hours.”
I felt pathetic.
I walked back to my room and lay down. The thirst was unbearable. I decided to sip water more frequently despite the likelihood of vomiting. I realised that if I didn’t try to help myself, I would be in an even worse state than when I came in. My plan to snatch back a tiny amount of control was enough to make me feel less despair. I made myself take tiny sips of water over the next few hours. Eventually, I kept the water down. My body was grateful for my decision. Though I wasn’t taking in enough water to make myself feel well, it was enough to not make myself feel worse. I imagined myself in a possible world where I had not taken any action and felt scared.
9am, still no treatment.
12 noon, still no treatment
2pm, still no treatment
3pm. I ate toast and drank a cup of tea. I kept it down. I texted my partner and friends saying I wanted to leave. I told them this every few hours. Each time, they convinced me to stay.
4pm. I was moved to a new bed which was parked, among others, next to the nurse’s station. I’d lost my privacy. The hospital was overflowing. There was not enough time or space or staff. I thought my move might be a good sign. Perhaps I’d be seen soon. A person walking around the ward in circles groaned and fell onto his hands in front of me. He vomited into a small cardboard tray. He slowly got up again. I knew that what he felt as he fell, even under thick layers of nausea, was the same despair I’d felt as I let out a quiet animal scream hours before. A woman shouted for help from behind a curtain. She kept shouting, she wanted to be seen by someone, she said, anyone. I looked in her direction as she came out onto the ward. She said she had been waiting for a long time. She was sick, she needed help. She was told that the wait was long, but she already knew this. She was told other people are sicker than her, so they needed to be seen before her. She knew this too. But she was still sick, she was still in need of treatment. The shuffling of people into priorities adds a little more mass to the terrible ache hanging above us.
5pm. I asked a nurse about leaving. I could eat and drink now, could I leave? He told me it was my choice. I told my partner this. He texted me back.
“Fuck these people. How is it your choice? They are medical professionals, they should decide.”
It is not my choice at all. What if my vomiting came back once I was home? What if they did tests and I needed treatment for something else? It had been 18 hours. I was ready to leave, but I had placed my bets by this point. I’d sunk 18 precious hours into waiting. I tried to balance the pros and cons in my head, but then the tea trolley came along, and I decided to stay. I wondered if they timed tea and sandwiches to keep me there. Clearly not. But for my sleep deprived brain, this made perfect sense.
I relished taking a few steps away from my bed to a different part of the nurse’s station to charge my phone: a brief freedom. I felt weirdly at home, as if I just lived in the hospital now. That was that. Just me, the bed in the middle of the ward, and the well-timed cups of sugary tea. That was my life.
8pm. I found another nurse and asked if I could leave.
“You could leave, but Rachel, you’re next in the queue!” I didn’t know what startled me more, that I was next, or that she knew my name. I realised that nurses had special powers that I didn’t, and never would, possess. I realised they’d known my name the entire time, that I was being watched. I went back to my bed and another nurse appeared.
9:13pm. Bloods taken, a saline drip was in my arm, I waited. A doctor gave me anti-nausea pills. I gave urine samples, the first one went missing. The second, the doctor told me, informed them that I was dehydrated.
“But you already knew that.” She said.
“Yes” I laughed, not knowing why I was laughing.
11:30pm. Home. I slept for nearly 24 hours.