Page 12 of In Sheets of Rain

4

Welcome To The City, Country Bumpkin

Iwas starving. We hadn’t stopped all morning. Autumn had struck with a vengeance and the high winds were messing with people’s heads. We’d dealt with two mentally unstable patients already and had just received a callout to a woman yelling obscenities at passing traffic on Karangahape Road.

“This should be good,” Simon said.

“K’ Road is always an eye opener,” I agreed.

“That’s why I work Pitt Street.”

“For the crazies?”

“Nothing like an R24 to spice up a dayshift.”

I laughed as the ambulance rolled out of the station.

It was a Priority Two dispatch, which meant we had to be assigned the job immediately but didn’t need to use our lights and sirens to get there. Pitt Street ran off K’ Road, so the distance was a factor. But also, the patient was thought to be a nuisance and not in immediate danger.

I wondered who made those assessments when we came upon the scene.

“Was she hit by a car?” I asked as Simon double parked the ambulance.

“Collapse maybe.”

We wouldn’t know until we assessed her. You didn’t know what you’d face from one job to the other and the categories Comms gave the jobs weren’t necessarily the correct ones. There was only so much a call-taker could glean from a frantic 111 phone conversation.

The patient was lying out on the cold pavement, wearing a short mini skirt and sequinned tank top. Her brown skin was pebbled with goosebumps and her eyes were rolled back in her head. She moaned pitifully.

I placed the med kit to the side and knelt down beside her, touching her shoulder gently.

“Hey,” I said. “Ambulance. What’s happening, ma’am?”

“It hurts! It hurts!” she moaned in a high-pitched voice, rolling from side to side manically.

“What hurts?”

“My stomach.”

“Were you hit? Assaulted?”

She shook her head, making her long, dark hair fly over her face, covering her closed eyelids.

“Any medical conditions we need to know about?” I asked, opening the med kit.

Another head shake. Another moan.

“Did you take something?”

“No. Nothing like that. Make it stop hurting. Please!”

“Load and go,” Simon said behind me. He’d brought the stretcher in close so we could scoop the patient and make a run for the nearby hospital.

“OK,” I said, finishing taking her vitals. “We’re going to take you up to ED,” I told the patient. “What’s your name?”

“Sally.”

“Here we go, Sally,” I said as Simon and I lifted her onto the stretcher.

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