Hello, Nurse

I guess that I should explain what led up to yesterday night’s entry.

Around half past one in the night I wake up of the sound of someone knocking on my bedroom door. Usually when someone is knocking on my bedroom door on a Friday night there is some wasted guy or girl at a party in the shared apartment who’s looking for the bathroom or a place to sleep. So I ignored the knocking. After a few seconds the person outside the door knocks again, so I decide just to let the person in and tell him or her that this is not a bathroom and not my bedroom and to get lost. Unless she’s hot and needs a place to crash, of course.

But, enter stage left; big surprise.

Since it’s finally dark in my room at night after I got the curtains, I was unable to see who entered, except that it was a woman who was holding a hand to her chest, she had severe respiratory trouble and when she entered the room, she more or less collapsed beside my bed. I turn on the light and realize that it’s one of the girls I live with. Since I’ve just woken up and only after about an hour of sleep, it takes about half a minute before I understand what’s going on. She is still moving, but I can hear that she has a very hard time breathing and she’s almost unable to talk: “Can’t breathe, emergency ward”.

I wake up one of the guys I live with, tell him to look after her while I run outside to hail a cab. On a Friday night it’s very easy to get a cab in my neighbourhood and it would probably go a lot faster to get her in a car and race to the emergency ward than to call an ambulance and wait for that to arrive. She’d not gotten any worse since she entered my bedroom either. About five minutes later we’re at the emergency ward, she’s breathing, but still struggling. Luckily, it didn’t get any worse on the ride down.

They are a professional bunch, the nurses and doctors at the emergency ward. They quickly got her into a room, hook her up to expensive medical equipment with graphs and alarms, do a few quick tests and give her some medication that quickly helped and made it a lot easier for her to breathe. The doctor though that it might be the whooping cough, but couldn’t be sure until they’d done some tests. When I left at around half past three in the morning, she was taken to the observation ward, where she was supposed to be until this morning, but I later found out that they had moved her to a nearby hospital. It could be that she’s having some kind of virus infection in her throat.

Just heard from her now, seems like she’s coming back home tomorrow. Good shit.

So yesterday night was way more eventful than it should be.


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