copyright ©
1998
Joseph Woodard
All rights
reserved
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"Do you think you could give me a first aid opinion?" she
asked. I couldn't see her so I came to the latched screen door. Outside, she staggered and
tried to focus on my face. That startled me. Celia's a hugely fat woman. When she
missteps, small children scoot out of the way. She wore a thin yellow dressing gown with a
purple rayon chemise underneath, not exactly walking wear. She gripped a small purple
towel in her left hand. She held out her right hand for me to see. Blood ran down her
fingers. Something had split her palm near the heel of the thumb. She patted her forehead
using the towel in her good paw.
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She raised the gashed palm up like a Ping-Pong paddle. More blood
streaked her bare forearm. She wiped it with the towel. She wadded the terrycloth with her
left hand to expose a dry surface and reapplied the crumpled pad to her forehead.
"I fell in the bathtub and hit my head. Do you think this needs to be
stitched?"
"Yes," I said. I wondered if she might fall over again. I slowly pushed open
my screen door, allowing her to retreat out of its arc. She wobbled and almost went down
as she reversed course.
"Do you want me to call 911?" I asked as I walked her ten steps to the front
door of her apartment.
"No, no. I wasn't even sure I wanted to do anything about this." She waved
the injured hand. "I just thought I'd ask somebody's opinion."
I couldn't quite make sense of the incident given the way she acted. I gathered we
weren't so much neighbor helping injured neighbor calling for help as we were two
consulting detectives like Holmes and Watson, rendering up opinions about an interesting
crime we'd both observed.
"I believe I've been shot, Dr. Watson. Do you agree?"
"Yes, Holmes. Quite. That large hole in your head is a definite clue."
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I
summoned the manager's wife who helped Celia dress and find her
medical insurance card. She wrapped Celia's wound in a large red towel. I thought it was a
clever cosmetic trick to disguise the bleeding, like medieval surgeons who gowned in red
outfits so bloody stains would appear less gruesome. My car was forty steps away. We
walked slowly. Celia and I motored to Alta Bates hospital in Berkeley. On the way she told
me a story about learning to drive a stick shift in Naples when she was married to a U.S.
Navy man stationed there. Some Italian driving a Fiat chased her into the sheltering
vigilance of two military policemen. Boy, did he regret it, she said. Celia weighs close
to 300 pounds now. The story seemed a little far-fetched. On the other hand, maybe some
Italian did chase her all around town. Southern Italians like big women.
I parked right in the emergency driveway at Alta Bates. The Italian story, told at
length, might have been true. Then again, had the U.S. Military been the show of force
necessary to save Celia from a sex-crazed Neapolitan maniac? I took no chances. I called
for a wheel chair. The grinning Filipino security guard who greeted us kindly rolled one
out.
We waited in the cramped entranceway for thirty minutes. Not another soul asked us
what we were waiting for. Celia moaned and made jokes about wanting to throw up. Nothing
worked to draw anyone's attention.
Finally a nurse, a sarcastic gay man who hated his job, wrote down her complaint. She
tried to explain, for woozy reasons, exactly how she'd fallen and ended up with her head
in the drain, one leg inside the bathtub and one out.
"Whatever you say, dear. It works for me," he said through his nose.
He wrote down not more than five words. He must have covered the whole event with the
absolute minimum number of descriptors, something like, "Fell. Hit head. Cut
hand." Anyway, no doctor would have to waste valuable time reading it.
A female triage nurse answered my question about how long it would take, "About
three hours. Not too bad. Don't quote me. If anybody asks you who told you three hours,
tell them Dave said so."
She answered questions without batting an eye when I addressed her as Dave. I asked,
"Dave, why is it taking so long to treat Celia?" Her answer was the best pun of
the night. She said Celia would have to wait until a stitch room opened.
They put us in a rating womb. A TV hung at one end. Prisoners sat at the other end.
Celia watched the ten o'clock news. She kept slumping off. I'd carried some books with me
in my backpack. I studied the Communist Manifesto. It made some good points.
We waited and waited. I found Dave and begged her to ask someone to examine Celia.
Finally,
an orderly pushed open a secret panel in the wall of the room and told Celia to
come in. I asked him if he could push her wheelchair as she was half knocked out from the
blow to her head.
"Yeah. I guess I could drive." She disappeared into the secret room.
It
was a slow night in the emergency room. I watched Letterman on TV interview a high
school hero who escorted seven young ladies simultaneously to his senior prom. Nothing of
greater consequence that happened during the day or even during the previous week was
mentioned, not the 207 point drop in the stock market, or the attack by Mexican troops on
Chiapas, or the child that received two life terms for stabbing his mother to death, or
the Vice President confusing Michael Jackson with Michael Jordan. Black people all sing
and play ball, don't they?
I waited and waited. I asked an orderly, "Have they fixed Celia Brandon or has
she been sold for scrap?"
"She's next."
"Good. Then I won't have to pay rent on my chair. I can leave before the landlord
comes to collect."
"Ha. Ha," he intoned with a patronizing look useful for dealing with the
self-important.
I sat down like a good boy. I didn't want to piss off anybody who might stick
something in Celia. I live next door to her and she knows how to fall on things.
Letterman's band leader admitted he organized a high school band called the Fabulous
Fugitives.
Two hours after going in the back room, Celia got five stitches in the hand. They
ignored her for the first hour and a half. The mother of another patient had to put ice in
a rubber glove and bring it to her so she could relieve her facial swelling.
"This is sort of a self-help emergency room," the mother explained to Celia.
Meanwhile,
I watched two black women walk in and ask if they were pregnant. They were.
Celia overheard. She told me later on the way home. A midnight basketball squad arrived in
an ambulance. One of them had run head first into the metal edge of an open gym locker
door. Another woman had drunk so much water she'd washed nearly all the vital salts out of
her body. They iced her down to stop convulsions and pumped her full of banana juice or
Gatoraid or something. Another cut her foot in the shower. Celia had the best act, I
thought. She'd fallen in her tub, smacked her head, cut her mouth from inside, and sliced
her hand.
Around twelve PM, a doctor came and tapped her skull to see if it was all in one piece. He
told her, really, to take two aspirin and call in the morning if she still felt bad. Don't
worry about the stitches, he told her. A knowledgeable friend can take them out in about
eight days, he went on. Just don't get infected.
Then he took away her wheelchair and made her walk out to the car.
We made it back to the apartment building by half past midnight. Three hours, not too
bad. That woman, Dave, was right.
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