Story and Photograph by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

The giant poodle barrels into me head on, smashing my glasses into my face. I’m in pain, I can feel dripping down my face into my eye, and I’m sopping up blood with tissues waiting for the flow to subside. There is a two centimetre cut above my eye where my glasses have stuck into the flesh. I was about to take the dogs for a walk and the carpenter is next door preparing to work on my floor, so I go up to the corner and see him, tell him what has happened, ask if he doesn’t mind walking one of the dogs and I’ll leave the door open for him. The taxi company says it’ll be fifteen minutes, but when I say I’ve had an accident a taxi arrives almost immediately. I’ve dragged the garbage bag outside, even with the sting of my face I’m irritated that I won’t get the garbage out.

The taxi driver calls in to find out where the hospital is. It’s a public holiday and I was not aware of that, and I’m relieved to hear that all the things I had planned to do I couldn’t have done anyway. We drive off to the hospital, it’s really an orthopaedic clinic. The driver is preparing to drive off, but the cleaner at the door says they don’t open until 9, I can sit and wait. I don’t want to sit there until 9. I could just as well sit at home and finish the coffee on the table, smoke a cigarette. So the taxi driver takes me home again. It was an expensive way to find out which hospital I needed to go to, but at least I know now. It’s a hassle to find these things out.

I drive back to the hospital, walk in. But I’m still upset that the emergency list for hospitals has me arriving at one that isn’t open, and I’m unhappy. The gasp when I walk up to the counter in my shoes, having missed the signs, to go back and take them off and return to the counter and be told to go back and get the slippers. And then there’s a questionnaire on a clipboard, and then a fuss about my health care card, it’s expired and I haven’t noticed. You have to pay the full amount in cash they say, and I storm back to the door and put my shoes back on and shout at them that this is not the way to behave when this is an emergency patient! I go home and dig through drawers, find the envelope with the card in it, drive back to the hospital again. They were going by the book, they didn’t expect me to walk out, and they also didn’t expect me to return. This time they’re very efficient, I’m very efficient, they’re sorry and I’m sorry and we’re all apologetic in a professional kind of a way and completely synchronized in our determination to reach a satisfactory conclusion together. I get taped up, bandaged up, and we part on warm terms.

The taxi driver says that everyone calls an ambulance these days. The hospitals don’t pay a lot of attention to people who turn up in taxis. So people call ambulances, even for small things, and the ambulances are over-stretched and not coping. I don’t like the idea of taking an ambulance. I wouldn’t have gone at all except it’s my eye and I wouldn’t like to damage it. I’m bothered to be dragged into the medical system.