Holier Than Thou (4 page)

4

It was, of course, horrifying that the old lady got tasered. I’d had a bad feeling from the get-go that Friday. Tim and I had had a spat before work about how after three months of living together, he had still never made the bed or changed the linen. Our boss,Johanna, decreed that Nick and I should be the ones to oversee bringing the old lady in, seeing as how we’d had the most to do with the family that week.

What a week. On the Monday I’d been serving my time in the tiny Intake Office and had taken a call from a very distraught woman whose elderly mother, a seventy-year-old Vietnamese lady living in Lachlan Grove, was ‘acting crazy’ and had not eaten or drunk for two days. We were not supposed to use family members as interpreters, and the old lady had only a little English, so it’d been me, Nick and a Vietnamese interpreter who trooped into the fibro house on the Monday afternoon at 4 p.m. It was bloody hot, hot enough to madden anyone, let alone soevemeone who was already mad. I had spent all morning on the phone to the Interpreter Service, where some Priceless Type gave me a line about
no Vietnamese interpreters available until some time next week and really I should make my bookings for the suddenly psychotic much more in advance
. I kicked it up to Johanna, who entreated them with her best hysteria, to no avail. She kicked it up to Choong, the senior psychiatrist, who entreated further.

While Choong was upping the ante with ‘high risk’ this, ‘serious concern’ that and how
no, he couldn’t certify someone until he had actually attempted to interview them in their own language and actually we don’t call it ‘certifying’ anymore
, and Johanna stood over him gesticulating wildly, I picked up another extension and dialled Kim from admin downstairs. I happened to know that Kim was friends with a lady from the Interpreter Service and never had trouble booking them for the community psychiatry clinics. I explained the situation to Kim, gave her the prospective patient’s address and hung up. Thirty seconds later, after making a call to some bat-phone, the details of which were withheld from us mere mortals, Kim rang me back with the news that she had bagged us an interpreter for 4 p.m. that day.

‘
Hang up
,’ I mouthed to Choong.

‘Unbelievable,’ said Johanna, fanning herself with a manila folder, looking, as she often does, tachycardic.

‘You should get Kim a present,’ I advised.

‘I shouldn’t have to
bribe
admin staff to get an interpreter service,’ she blustered.

‘That’s very true,’ I agreed, and turned to Choong. ‘Can you come with us? She might have to come in tonight. It would save everyone time.’

‘I can’t come that late,’ said Choong.

He had a point. Heading out to the ’hood at 4 p.m. to start a lengthy assessment was not a recipe for finishing on time at five o’clock. Nick and I would surely not get back to the office before six.

‘Can we have overtime if we’re back late?’ I asked Johanna.

‘Absolutely not,’ she said. ‘Overtime is not the answer – sound time-management is. If you can’t get your work done within your rostered hours, then we can address that at your next performance review.’

Oh, so
I
was the problem with not finishing at five. Me. Nothing to do with the interpreter not being available til 4 p.m., Lachlan Grove being a thirty-minute drive away at best, and the unpredictable nature of assessing a mentally ill person. It was my time-management skills. Thank goodness Johanna had enlightened me or I might have concluded that my job was shitty and thankless! I thought briefly about calling her bluff and rescheduling the assessment til the next day, or the one after, or whenever I could be sure that it would not run into unpaid overtime, but I could still hear the daughter’s tearful recounting of her mother’s paranoia and dehydration and knew that I had to go that day.

When Nick and I showed up, we met the interpreter at the front fence. The woman who had called ushered us in to the family home and anxiously filled us in on the events of the previous week. We could hear the old lady, Mrs Luu, screaming in her bedroom while we tried to listen to the daughter.

‘What is she saying?’ Nick asked the daughter.

‘She say . . . She say terrible things . . . but there is no one else in there with her. I don’t know who she talk to . . . But she keep screaming back at them . . . ’ The daughter broke down and cried.

I fished a crisp tissue out of the packet I kept in my pocket and silently handed it to her.

‘She say I want her dead . . . She say I try to poison her . . . that I work in organise crime or something crazy . . . She won’t go in shower; she say there are cameras in there.’ More sobs. ‘She up all night . . . all night.’

When we finally managed to get Mrs Luu out her bedroom to talk to us we found her so paranoid and perplexed that she could barely string a sentence together in her own language. Mrs Luu was a tiny, frail lady with flyaway wisps of hair coming out of her bun and framing thick glasses. Her lips looked dry and parched and her breath was fetid.

We tried introducing ourselves and asking some questions about how she was and what was troubling her. The interpreter said that her speech often veered off tangentially and made no sense, that she seemed hesitant or blocked in answering the most simple questions.

‘Are you scared, Mrs Luu?’ asked Nick gently.

The interpreter translated.

There was a long pause as Mrs Luu looked constricted and answered with a brief word.

‘Yes,’ translated the interpreter.

‘I hope we can help you, said Nick.

But come Friday, we had to conclude that we had not really been helping that much. Choong had gone out on Tuesday morning – and prescribed an antipsychotic medication. It was left to the poor, harried daughter to supervise the taking of the medication and to look after her mother.

‘I’m casual at my job,’ worried the daughter. ‘I take more days off, no pay and then they stop giving me shifts.’

‘Your mother may have to be admitted to the hospital if no one can look after her, Amy,’ said Choong gently. ‘She may have to be admitted anyway if she is not improving in a few days.’

‘The mental hospital?’ The daughter looked alarmed.

‘Yes.’

‘No! I look after her.’

Mrs Luu refused to take the medicine anyway.

height= width="0em"On Friday she was still not eating or drinking, and had barricaded herself in her bedroom with the meat cleaver from the kitchen. The daughter, Amy, sobbed this out to me on the phone. I said we would come immediately.

‘This is nuts Nicholarse.’ I stood up and addressed Nick over the partition. ‘She’ll have to come in.’

‘Yep.’ He stood up too, clicking and unclicking his ballpoint pen.

Nick drove the short distance to the main hospital building. We pulled into the ambulance bay of Bannerman House, the mental health unit situated at the back. I ran inside to collect the schedule – the certificate ordering that Mrs Luu be brought to hospital for psychiatric assessment – from Choong, who had just crossed the last ‘t’ with his fountain pen. I blew on it to dry it.

‘I don’t know where we are going to put her,’ Choong muttered, looking at the whiteboard in the nurses’ station that showed an already overflowing ward.We both flinched every time the person in the seclusion room threw him or herself up against its walls.

‘You’ll sort something out . . . ’ I ran back outside, jumped into the car, belted myself back into my seat and rang Befftown police station. After the usual interrogation about why I was unable to bring the knife-wielding psychotic person in to hospital with my bare hands and had to take the police officers away from real police business to help, the duty officer agreed to ‘send a car’. I rang the ambos too – there being a knife and all – and they said they’d come as soon as they could.

Nick and I pulled up a couple of doors down from the Luu’s place to wait grimly for our colleagues in uniform.

‘Did you go to circus practice last night?’ I asked. Nick was training to be a carnie at his local community hall in Marrickville. He did tumbling, juggling, silks, trapeze, trampoline . . . and the summer before he’d done a clowning course.

‘Yeah,’ he sighed, ‘I sucked though. Need to build up more strength everywhere or I’ll just fall to my death.’

‘Bummer.’

We sat with the engine off and I was thankful that summer was over.

‘Ooh, I love this song . . . Remember it?’ I turned up the radio.

‘Vaguely.’

‘
Vaguely
? I loved these guys.’

‘One-hit wonders.’

‘Of All the Gin Joints were
not
one-hit wonders. They had, like,
albums.
’

‘But only one
hit.
’

‘They had albums, I’ve seen them in the iTunes store—’

‘—which no one buys; they only buy the hit!’

I glared at him and he glared back.

‘Did you buy any of the albums?’ he interrogated.

‘No . . . ’ I admitted. ‘I just bought the hit.’

‘Hah!’

My phone beeped in my handbag and I fished it out. A text from Lara.

Day is never over. Master got me workin’

I messaged her back.

Maybe someday master’s gonna set me free…

I locked the keypad and put the phone back.

‘How do you think this is gonna go?’ I pointed to the Luus’ house.

Nick’s blue eyes met mine.

‘Unhappily.’

Very unhappily as it turned out. We waited for forty-five minutes in the car until the police and ambos arrived within minutes of each other. Poor Mrs Luu refused to come out of her room, and when the officer broke the door in, she went us with the meat cleaver swinging and we all sprinted back outside.

Amy sobbed while Nick and I tried to tell her she had done all she could and now we had to let the police do their job and get mum to hospital. However they could.

The police called their commander, and soon theTactical ResponseTeam arrived and the whole street was cordoned off. Officers in riot gear with police dogs swarmed about in the front yard, and any of the neighbours who hadn’t known that Mrs Luu was mad did now. A police negotiator and a Vietnamese interpreter were added to the mix.

‘Shit,’ I said to Nick weakly.

Two more hours we were there for. Unsurprisingly, the negotiator was unable to negotiate with Mrs Luu, and in the end the tactical guys stormed her room and shot her with a taser gun.

From outside we could hear her screaming, and Amy screaming too.

The miserable drama at Lachlan Grove was followed by a frustrating stint of arguing with the nurse-in-charge and the senior doctor in the Emergency Department at Elizabethtown Hospital. They didn’t like mentally ill people in their Emergency Department. Even seventy-year-old ladies who have just been shot with a taser.

‘Do
not
bring her in here,’ barked Dr Smug Fucker, barring the doorway of the ambulance bay.The paramedics had already got the gurney out of the ambulance but they stopped in dismay, looking to Nick and me for guidance.

‘Er, Dr . . . er . . . Hong,’ I began.

‘She’s
yours
,’ he insisted. ‘She’s Mental Health.’

It cracks me up how they say that. They say it all the time. Mrs Luu
is
Mental Health, like James Bond
is
007. Honestly, someone will be wheeled in on a gurney with their head cracked open and their femur protruding a good few inches through the skin, but their file will reveal they are also being treated for a mental illness, the triage nurse’s eyes will light up and he will utter the immortal line . . . ‘It’s Mental Health’, and somewhere out there the on-call Mental Health clinician’s pager will beep in the night, while the patient is shoved out into the waiting room.

‘Yes . . . ’ I said to Dr Smug Fucker, ‘but—’

‘Take her straight to Bannerman House.’

‘Er, I think that the protocols outlined in the Memorandum of Understanding . . . ’

‘She’s Mental Health,’ he repeated, managing to address Nick and me without actually looking at us.

‘She’s also a human being in need of medical attention. She’s been shot with a taser.’

He hated us; God did he hate us. He sniffed. Then barked at the paramedics: ‘Well? What’s her condition?’

‘Um . . . obs are stable at the moment—’

‘See?’ He stalked over to poor Mrs Luu, who looked sick, tiny and terrified. Her glasses were now cracked, a detail which made my heart ache in my chest.

The doctor grabbed her frail wrist, felt for a pulse, then shone a light aggressively in her eyes. She recoiled.

‘She’s fine. Take her to Bannerman House.’ And he hit the large rubber button that caused the glass doors to hiss shut in our faces.

Defeated, we drove around to the back of the hospital in convoy and pulled up in the ambulance bay of Bannerman House, where we were shouted at by the nurse-in-charge for failing to get the proper medical assessment in ED and
what if she has heart failure and anyway there aren’t any beds and what was she supposed to do
?

Choong arrived to attempt a rescue, as he often does, kindly greeted Mrs Luu and then disappeared inside to try to find a patient at least nominally less psychotic than Mrs Luu and with non-existent or non-litigious family members, whom he could discharge to make room for her.

The nurse-in-charge glared at us and flounced off. I thought Nick might have rooted her and then not called her. He doesn’t always think things through, old Nicholarse.

By then the paramedics were well and truly over it, and I didn’t blame them. I’d had nothing to eat since the honey toast Tim had made for me at 7 a.m. and now it was 3 p.m. Neither had I peed in that time.

At 3:45wer="3"At, Mrs Luu was admitted to Bannerman House, and Nick and I were finally free to limp back to the Community Health Centre. We stopped to buy some fresh manoush with salad from the Lebanese bakery on the corner. When we returned to our office there was muted applause from Kristo, a veteran and a quasi-father figure to me and Nick, who sat in the next cluster of cubicles, and Tessa who was there chatting to him.