The call comes in around six a.m. because that’s when old
people tend to get up. Rain or shine, winter or summer, sick or retired – they
like to see the sun rise. I’d been at a house fire the night before and my
partner had been chasing transfers, so the page for the little old lady fall
doesn’t hold a lot of appeal. We grouse around, find our boots, and set off in
the early morning chill with the ambulance lights bouncing off the downtown
Christmas lights and the new sun cutting the horizon.
Feeling
the lack of coffee.
Our
patient is supine on the floor of a living room that is rife with collectables,
Santa wrapping paper and two walkers. The obligatory poinsettias on spindly end
tables. Maneuvering the cot will be a difficulty, but not impossible, so my
partner initiates that project while I tend to the fall victim.
Almost
certainly a broken hip, with the classic rotating of the ankle, the shortening
of one leg. She rates her pain at a ten – on a scale of one to ten - in that
quiet way the elderly have of voicing a difficulty without letting it own them.
She had fallen, she said, in the bathroom, but Frank had helped her to get
dressed and had gotten her this far before they both gave out.
“He was
going to take you?” My question is abstracted; I’m listening for her blood
pressure.
‘To the
hospital?’ was the tag on my unfinished question, but she misunderstands, and answers
a bit archly. “Well, he always has. Taken care of me.”
And for
the first time I see Frank. He hovers in the kitchen doorway on the telephone –
small, thin and bent. Not looking as though he could take care of anything this
morning.
My
partner has wrestled the cot into the living room, and from there it’s easy
peasy – our patient is small, our cot a modern wonder. Pillows for comfort
around the hip, two steps going down the porch, across a beautifully manicured
lawn and we’re in the rig with a minimum of discomfort.
I dash
back for the jump kit, across the porch and into the living room. And for the
first time I see Frank.
He’s crying. He had, of course,
thought we’d left, and he’s leaning against the china cupboard with his face in
his hands, shoulders shaking, when I come back in.
He’s
quick. His head comes up, hands mop his cheeks, and I notice how big those
hands are, How rough, with their stubby nails and scarred knuckles.
“Forget
something?” he asks drily.
Courage
wears a lot of faces. But this face, here today, is the one that’s breaking my
heart.
He’d
always taken care of her. And today he couldn’t get her from the bathroom to
the front door. Always held her hand, and today we’re doing that. Slept with
her for probably sixty years and tonight he’ll sleep alone. In one horrid and
irrevocable moment, his life has changed utterly, and he wants to know if I
forgot something.
Yeah, I
forgot to be kind.
Courage
is hardly ever about the rush you get when you dash into the house fire. It’s
not about extricating the accident victims from the mangled car or even doing
CPR on the SIDS baby. Courage has love and compassion at its core.
So I
put on my own courage face and breach the comfort zone between myself and this man
I have only just seen; and I hug him. At first he stiffens, but then he hugs me
back and for a long moment we just stand there like that.
Finally
I say, “Do you want to ride to the hospital with us?” and Frank and I walk out
into the new morning.
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