Page 67 of Broken Heart Syndrome
Mrs Jones was treated for her acute coronary syndrome, but she never got back on her feet whilst she was under our care. This partly had to do with her cantankerous nature and her propensity to tell the physios to bugger off, and partly because she was simply too frail and her dementia was progressing.
Two weeks ago her care had been transferred to Lou’s Elderly Care team. I doubted that in that time she had improved to the point where she could walk briskly on a treadmill with a gradually increasing incline for ten minutes. Assuming they must have the wrong patient, I grabbed the referral form and instantly recognized Dylan’s barely legible scrawl. The only thing he had bothered to write in the clinical details was ‘chest pain’ in big letters.
‘Oh crappity crap,’ I muttered under my breath. ‘Hi, Gladys,’ I said, smiling down at her.
She scowled at me and grunted a discourteous, ‘Tabitha.’
Having expected no less I forged ahead. ‘How’s the walking going at the moment?’
‘What a ridiculous question,’ she snapped, pulling her handbag in closer to her on her lap. ‘I’m fit as a fiddle. I even had to mow Mr Davis’s front garden yesterday. The lazy sod was letting it get out of hand. The street has standards to maintain.’
Mrs Jones had been in hospital for nearly five months now. She was the ultimate bed-blocker. Other than sitting out every so often in the chair in her room (which she did under great protest), I wasn’t aware that she had moved anywhere in weeks.
Rhys stepped forward, obviously wanting to speed things along in the busy list. ‘If you could just step up on to the treadmill, Mrs Jones, we can get going.’
She stared up at him for a moment, and then released one of her hands from the death-grip she had on her handbag, raising it to point right in front of his nose.
‘You,’ she said angrily, ‘have a stupid face.’ Rhys blinked, then straightened up slightly and rubbed his chin. Knowing that the vast majority of the nursing staff would disagree with this assessment, I had to fight to swallow my laughter, but Owain started chuckling as he opened up her notes.
‘Says here, Rhys, that she’s got vascular dementia,’ he said through his barely contained laughter. ‘Got to be honest with you, she seems pretty lucid to me.’ Rhys shot him an angry glare across the room and Owain held his hands up, still smiling. ‘Well, she has got a point, mate.’ Rhys rolled his eyes and focused his attention back on Gladys. He bent down again and went to take her handbag so he could help her to her feet, but she slapped his hands away.
‘Unhand me, young man. I am perfectly capable of standing without your assistance,’ she told him, then signalled me over. ‘Take this, dear,’ she said, shoving her handbag at me, and then narrowing her eyes when I took it. ‘Don’t you dare steal anything.’
‘Wouldn’t dream of it, Gladys.’
‘Don’t let Stupid Face anywhere near it either.’
Owain snorted and Rhys sighed. ‘Can we start now, Mrs Jones?’
‘You young people, always so impatient,’ she snapped, and made a weak attempt to stand. She had both hands braced on the arms of the wheelchair and was straining to lift up, but only got her bottom about an inch in the air. After plopping back down, she sighed.
‘Fine, Stupid Face, you may assist me.’ Attempt number two did not go to plan either when it became clear that, once upright, she couldn’t put any weight through her legs.
‘Right,’ Owain said. ‘This is going nowhere. Call the porters.’
Oh no, no, no. The exercise test room was in the middle of the outpatient clinic, and Dr Williams was on the warpath at the moment about inappropriate cardiac investigations. If he saw Mrs Jones waiting in the hallway outside the exercise test room for a porter in a wheelchair (considering she looked about five hundred years old) he would definitely ask the guys and look at the referral form.
Not only would Dylan be in trouble for wasting a precious appointment, but his clinical information, being all of two words, would not go down well either. Dylan could not afford any more problems in his Elderly Care stint. He’d been told that if he didn’t get his act together he could fail his annual review and his training would be set back.
I smiled nervously. ‘Hey, guys, you know what, it won’t take me two secs to wheel her back, and I’ve got to go over that way anyway. You carry on and I’ll just …’ I jerked my head to the door, ‘whizz her back, ‘kay?’
Without waiting for an answer I grabbed her handbag, flung it in her lap, flicked off the brake of her wheelchair, and I started burning down the corridor with her.
I was on the home straight when I heard Dr Williams’s booming voice echoing up ahead. Frantically I looked around, but all I could see was the door into Tom’s office. It was either risk seeing him or definitely run into Dr Williams whilst wheeling an elderly lady in the cardiac department, and the subsequent awkward questions.
I pushed through the door and found the office mercifully empty other than the usual mess. Gladys looked around her surroundings, and then at me, as I plopped down on the swivel chair at the desk and blew out a sigh of relief.
‘Are we doing another test now, dear?’
‘Um … no,’ I said, not quite knowing what explanation to offer as to why we were sequestered in an overly messy office.
‘Right,’ she said briskly, completely unfazed. ‘Then if you don’t mind I’ll have a cup of tea, some custard creams, and you can putNeighbourson that television.’ She gestured imperiously at Tom’s ancient computer monitor. I was about to laugh but swallowed it abruptly when the door was flung open and Tom stepped into the small space, falling over the wheelchair.
‘Fucking shit,’ he exclaimed as he went off balance and nearly fell into Gladys’s lap. ‘What the –’
‘Dr Longley,’ I said with forced calm, thinking quickly, ‘I think you’ve met Mrs Jones.’ He recovered himself and turned his shocked eyes from Gladys to me. I was still in his swivel chair and thought it best to jump up from my casual pose. When I didn’t offer any explanation, he politely smiled at Gladys.
‘Of course, lovely to see you again, Mrs Jones. So glad that you’ve made the time to visit me in my office.’
