Spanish Emergency

Last Thursday at midnight, I was returning home from an improv comedy performance (my usual pastime) and the night nurse, Tia greeted me, alarmed -- “Ally! Where have you been! I’ve been trying to call you!”

I peered into the bedroom, and was met with a scene from CSI Miami. Ada lay on her bed, huge pools of clotted blood covering her pillow and soaked her nightie.

She’d had a nose bleed, the fourth big one in the last two days. She seemed unfazed, despite her white hair now a cherry red colour down one side. We decided to take her to the emergency room at the hospital, save her bleeding to death in her sleep. Tia insisted we call an ambulance for ease of getting her there. I was freaked out by calling 911, because I’d only ever heard of people calling in major emergencies, and I didn’t want my recorded voice to be played back on the news in the event of some controversial mishap, so Tia did it for me.

The ambulance officers were two young Latino males, in navy colored uniforms, with long black hair tied back in pony tails. Aunt-Ada commented loudly ‘I don’t know if they are a man or a woman!’ An insult that mortified me, but showed she still had a sense of humor. They strapped poor Ada to a stretcher and transported her against her will.

In the hospital her blood-pressure went through the roof, and suddenly one of the Ambulance officers hit on me so weirdly I was left speechless.

Grabbing a chair for me to sit next to Ada, he moved his head very close to mine and stared into my eyes with a gentle intensity that only men who are very confident in bed can pull off. Then he whispered in a deep Spanish accent “She’s got pink-eye." (dramatic pause) "Be careful, I wouldn’t want you to get it in your beautiful, brown, eyes.”

I felt like Antonio Banderez had just told me “You’re hot, but be wary of the growing threat of rabies in the area.”

Then the other ambulance officer came up and said – "He likes you."

Surely this is against the rules? I had no idea how to react, so I turned red and they left. We were in the emergency until 6.30am the next morning. Ada stayed awake the whole time, asking us how we could do this to her. Tia and I sat sleepily telling her to relax, and eavesdropping on the other more interesting medical emergencies happening around us.

I could hear slow dripping from behind a curtain, and later found out that it was coming from a guy whose arm would not stop bleeding. Another guy woke up and threw a fit because he was hungry and the emergency department apparently has no food, even though they charge him thousands of dollars to sleep there.

Half way through the night Ada needed to pee, and when I went to get someone to help take the bars off the bed and lower her to the ground, they simply handed me a bed-pan and some gauze as toilet paper. That was the low point of the night, until I found myself walking around with the said bedpan post-pee, with no where to put it but under my seat.

The next day we had to take Ada back so they could stuff a camera that behaved like an earth worm up her nose. Then they stuffed the left nostril with dissolvable packing, that leaked brown ooze.

But the oddest thing was, I couldn't seem to get those ambulance officer eyes out of my head. I wonder how he hits on girls with Swine flu.