Saturday, October 14, 2006

Hysterical Lodger

My crewmate has taken this weekend off, so I'm working with reliefs this weekend.

Last night....well, actually early this morning, we were called to an 83 year old lady who'd been found on the floor at the side of her bed by the lodger, a young lady from Wales who is training to be a teacher.

Mary couldn't remember how she had ended up on the floor. She remembered coming upstairs, but nothing after that. She had no pain, and careful prodding didn't reveal any wincing or cries of "Ouch!" so we sat her up.

I was worried that she didn't remember how she ended up on the floor, and suspected she may have blacked-0ut, so I suggested we pop her down to hospital for a check up with a doctor. At that time of the morning, the local A&E shouldn't have been too busy and it was possible she wouldn't be there long, but Mary was adamant that she didn't want to go.

The young lady was quite upset and shocked that she'd found Mary on the floor, and had had a fit of hysterics thinking that Mary might have been dead. Despite the fact we now had Mary sitting up, the hysterics continued, and she spent the next 15 minutes trying to persuade her to go to hospital. Mary was having none of it. I did her pulse which was fine, her blood pressure was a little on the low side but not horrendously, but her blood sugar was quite low. Mary couldn't remember when she'd last eaten, so I asked the lodger to go and make Mary a cup of tea with at least three sugars in it, and some toast with some jam on, and explained that this was to bring Mary's blood sugar back up.

The lodger went off to her task, and Mary told us all about how she enjoyed going on holiday to various places abroad, while the lodger continued her hysterics into a mobile phone while making the toast and tea. Then the smoke alarm went off. The neighbours must have been really impressed. The lodger had burnt the toast due to lack of concentration. Mary told us the lodger was training to be a teacher. "Not a drama teacher by any chance?" asked my crewmate flippantly. "Yes actually," said Mary. Somehow we weren't surprised.

As Mary didn't want to go to hospital, I rang control to arrange the on-call GP to visit. The voice on the other end of the phone sounded rather familiar and I suspected it was Mark from Neenaw, but I wasn't sure so didn't want to ask. I'm sure he'll tell me if it was.

We left with the lodger calmed by the knowledge that a GP was going to visit, and Mary had got herself to bed.

1 Comments:

Blogger Spike said...

Most amusing post.

8:39 am  

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