Mid-June and a tad late

Hospital

Day 1

I am on the way to the Residencia when the phone rings in the car. I stop and get the message not to worry but that she has been vommitting and they are worried that there might be blood in the vommit so they have called an ambulance to take her to hospital. I arrive as they are putting her into the ambulance and I get in beside her for the journey.

On arrival she is whipped through reception and taken to a triage section from where they take her on to an emergency area: Boxes 2 and then on to a ward, a circle of beds around a central island where nurses and doctors gather and then on to a ward for observation. Another circle of beds with a central desk. They put up a  sign: Nil by mouth. She is very weak and immobile. She stays in overnight. I am pushed out of the ward and go home. There is no point in there being two exhausted patients.

Day 2

Up to the hospital in the morning to find her a little better. Later a couple of young doctors appear and prod her in the stomach for a while then tell me she might need an endoscopy as there is the possibility of bleeding in the oesophagus or the stomach and they need to know. Afterwards, one them takes me by the hand and said, ‘You have to know that this might be very grave’. He is altogether too young to tell me this. My two brothers-in-law arrive in time to hear what the doctor says which is that they are going to transfer her to another hospital – Meixoeira – for observation. The ambulance disappears with her on board. She is placed in a wing that resembles a hospice loaded with the old and infirm, groans from every side.

Days 3-5

I am equivocal. She looks so small in the hospital bed and then sitting on the chair, her head almost in her lap, dressed in the white uniform of hospitalisation. My daughter arrives and we have a very tearful interview with the doctor who tells us that there is a ‘non-suffrir’ understanding and that she will mention it in the alta – the document they give you when you leave the hospital and are able to work again. This is equivocal. In one sense a relief and in another a horror story. However, little by little Lucia recovers and after a few days is sent back to the residence. I put the alta document away for the time being. She is now pretty immobile: in a wheelchair, unable to feed herself and half asleep. This is all very distressing.

I await my brother-in-law whom I am going to follow to the second hospital, He will pick me up at the entrance to the emergency department which is busy with ambulances. This wait is profoundly distressing. A queue of the lost are carried past me unable to move, dribbling from the mouth, rolling their eyes, murmuring. This parable of the helpless includes all ages, even children. I wonder why and think of Clough’s lines:

Thou shalt not kill; but need’st not strive
Officiously to keep alive.

Lucia is getting close to being one of these – she too was carried out in a trolley to the ambulance lost in her own dreams and torments. For how much longer must this continue?