So I'd thrown the bleach down the toilet, Cillit Banged the cistern and the seat, and there was still limescale around the rim of the bowl. So I sloshed on a bit of Parazone limescale-remover for good measure . . .
The smell is the first thing: pungent, acrid, burning. The water in the loo turns milky white. Then the coughing starts and a little voice in the back of my mind says D'you know, I have the feeling you're not supposed to do that . . . but I think I've started so I'll finish and I do.
(The thing is, my back aches when I bend over at a certain angle, so I'm sitting on one of those foldy-uppy wooden chairs while I'm doing all this and practically have my face in the toilet bowl which - given the Noxious Fumes now emanating from it - is probably quite a stupid place to be.)
So - eyes streaming, nose running, coughcoughcough - I flush the loo thinking That'll get rid of it and it doesn't. So I wait a few minutes for the cistern to fill up and flush it again and it
still doesn't and then getting out of there begins to seem like a good idea. I am halfway down the stairs - coughcoughcough - when Joe comes out of the living room and, in a concerned voice, says Are you all right, Mum?
I tell him (though it takes quite a long time) that I think I may have accidentally poisoned myself.
Oh, he says, thinking I'm joking (which I half am, so's not to seem like some kind of drama queen having a fit of the vapours on account of just having cleaned the toilet). What with?
I hear Annie ask is Mum all right and he relays what I've just told him and goes back to whatever it is he's doing. She thinks he's joking. What - she's DRUNK it? she asks, sarcastically, neck deep in Facebook in the front room.
I am stranded - coughcoughcough - on the stairs, wishing I could move.
Annie decides, given the sound effects, that perhaps I
have poisoned myself. They both come and help me the rest of the way down the stairs and out of the back door into the fresh air. It is WONderful, though it burns when I breathe and by now I am a bit frightened.
The coughing begins to ease off and we decide that phoning NHS Direct is a good idea (on account of its being Saturday, of course, the local surgery is firmly shut) and Annie talks a lot to the nice lady on the other end but I can't much on account of being barely able to breathe. The nice lady promises an ambulance (after having established that I haven't done this on purpose) and Annie goes outside to flag it down and point it in the right direction when it arrives. Joe hovers around, looking anxious and not knowing quite what to do.
I do not want the ambulance men to have to pick their way through knee-deep cat fur and wet washing (as they'd have to if I stay where I am) to get to me, so Joe helps me totter through it myself and back into the living room. Which is full of used wine-glasses and empty bottles from the night before.
I make him get rid of them all into the kitchen. I may be dying, but I don't want to do it looking like some kind of hopeless alcoholic with no dignity.
The community paramedic arrives with armloads of kit. He is warm and comfortable-looking, with a round face and a neatly trimmed beard. He is called Martin and I want to keep him. He puts that clip thing on my finger and connects me to a machine. He puts an oxygen mask on my face and hooks me up to a tank. I begin to feel quite a lot better. He takes my blood pressure, which is sky high. Is it usually high? he asks. No, it's usually so low I'm nearly dead. Oh, he says.
I hear voices at the front door and Annie say Oh! There's more of you . . . are we expecting anybody else as well? Laughter. Things are starting to be less scary.
Then it becomes clear that the ambulance men are expecting to take me to hospital but I have washing to peg out and an essay on celebrity culture to write and I do not want to goooooooooooooooo . . .
Annie speaks to me as if I am a naughty child refusing to put its socks on. So does Joe. So do the three paramedics. So I capitulate. Ungracefully. I say I will only go if I get the full works and people start talking about sats and FBCs, Us and Es like they do on Casualty. (In future I shall be more careful about what I wish for.)
I am whizzed off to hospital (15 miles away) lying down. I cough occasionally, just enough to make it look as if all this effort and technology is being expended on a deserving cause. By the time we get there my breathing has become easier and I am starting to feel like a fraud. Until I need to go to the loo and they take the oxygen off so that by the time I get back to my trolleything (which is about six feet away) I am bent double again coughcoughcough.
I am wheeled into cubicles. These turn out to be bed-bays separated by curtains. I am next to a little old lady with a worried-looking middle-aged daughter. The little old lady seems to be asleep.
A doctor comes to see me just after a nurse has tried to put a cannula in the back of my hand (ow ow ow ow ow ow ow) and given up because she can't get into the vein. Not only am I to have FBCs, Us and Es, but also Clotting, an ECG and a chest x-ray. The doctor has obviously been watching Casualty so knows what he's doing. There is quite a lot of worried-looking reading of the labels on the bottles of bleach and limescale-remover, as various people try to establish what chemical I have invented by mixing them and fail. The nurse eventually manages to get some blood out of a vein in the crook of my elbow (more ow ow) and I am covered all over with little self-adhesive patches which are then connected to the wires that connect me to the ECG machine which the nurse forgets to switch on because suddenly the little old lady next to me starts bleeping madly and about a hundred people appear out of the woodwork, shouting. The daughter is hustled out of the room.
Then it becomes even more Casualty-ish, except that to begin with nobody seems able to agree on who's going to do what or where anything they need is. They keep calling the little old lady Rose but I know her name is Peggy and I've only been there a couple of hours. Then someone starts CPR (thud thud thud . . . thud thud thud) and somebody else (where have they
been?) arrives with the crash trolley.
I worry about the daughter, just outside, listening to all the bleeping and shouting and her mother being called Rose when her name is really Peggy. I close my eyes. Thud thud thud. They shock her (Clear! Thump. Again! Clear! Thump.) A nurse comes and tells me not to worry but there's a bit of a panic going on next door. I nod, having worked this out for myself.
Rose! ROSE! Squeeze my fingers!
Nobody seems to know how long it is since the bleeping started. There is some disagreement about whether it's six minutes, or seven. But suddenly Rose who is really Peggy has a pulse and has started breathing and one of the doctors has been told that Rose probably isn't squeezing his fingers because she doesn't think of herself as Rose at all but Peggy. When he tells Peggy to squeeze his fingers she is a good girl. People start to drift away. The crash trolley is packed up and wheeled out. A doctor goes out to talk to the daughter, who must be feeling she's been waiting hours. When he comes back in with her, he explains to those who are still there that if Peggy arrests again she is to be allowed to go. She is 86 with various medical conditions and a generally poor quality of life. My nurse comes back to turn my ECG machine on and my doctor returns to take a deep-tissue blood sample from my wrist just underneath where my bangles are to see whether I have enough oxygen in my body. He tells me it will hurt but it doesn't hurt nearly as much as I think Peggy's daughter probably is.
I am to go for a chest x-ray now so I will never get to hear the end of the story and let the daughter know how sorry I am that I didn't feel I could tell the shouting people that her mother's name wasn't Rose at all.
It turns out that the new trolley I am on is wider than the old ones were. What used to be three-point turns to get it out of cubicles have become myriad-point ones and it bangs into other trolleys and hits doorways. What if I was old and frail and frightened and in pain, I think, and I'm glad I'm not (though my breathing still hurts and I'm afraid to cough). Is anybody here with you? my nurse asks.
When I get to x-ray I have to take off my bra because it's underwired and has metal hooks. After the picture is taken, nobody thinks to suggest I might put it back on. I feel more mortified being wheeled back to A & E with my bra in my bag than I have about anything else; suddenly I have become a woman with nothing between me and the outside world other than my thin cotton top. Suddenly I feel exposed. Vulnerable.
In the foyer where the ambulances disgorge their cargo, two policemen are telling a man that if he carries on behaving like this in a public place they will be forced to make him leave it. He doesn't quite see it that way. I am parked outside a cubicle where my now-empty oxygen tank is changed for a full one that shrieks. Though my nurse says that's OK, nobody else agrees because the shrieking is at just that pitch where your brain fries and you can't think and she has to connect me to one that is inside the cubicle outside which I am parked instead. Inside the same cubicle, a doctor is asking a man to follow his finger.
I don't want to follow your finger. I want a cigarette.
Well you can't have a cigarette in here. Follow my finger.
I know I can't have a cigarette in here. That's why I want to go outside.
You can't go outside until I know that you can follow my finger.
I can
see your bloody finger. I don't need to follow it. I need a cigarette. Can't you understand what I'm saying?
I can understand what you're saying. I'm saying I can't let you go until I know you can follow my finger. Can you understand me?
I can understand what you're saying but I don't understand why you need me to follow your f*cking finger when I'm telling you I can see it perfectly well.
I need to know that you can move your eyes to follow my finger.
Well I can't. But I'm going to have a cigarette now.
And off he goes. The doctor sighs.
I take off my oxygen mask to see if I can breathe without it. I can. I feel as if I've been here forever and I want to go home now. My doctor appears to tell me that if my bloods are OK and my chest x-ray is clear I'll be all right to go as the deep-tissue blood test shows I have plenty of oxygen in my body, my ECG is fine and my blood pressure is returning to something close to normal. Good, I say. Thank you.
When all the results are back and it doesn't look as if I'm permanently damaged (and neither has the chest x-ray revealed that smoking has given me lung cancer phew), he comes to tell me. If anything worrying happens after I leave I must come straight back. I will, I say. Thank you. A nurse brings me a phone so I can call home. Annie wants to know if I want her to come on the bus and get me and when I say no I can manage she says she'll meet me at the bus station. I say I'm not sure if I can walk home from the bus station and in an instant I feel tearful and shaky because how can I go on the bus and walk home from the bus station when I came here in an ambulance and now I haven't got my bra on and I can't even go into the toilet and put it on because a cleaner has just mopped the floor and won't let me. Can she perhaps phone Ben and see if he can come and get me? He can.
I find a nurse to give the phone back to. I ask if I can go now. Has the doctor said I can. Yes, I say. So you can, she says. It all feels oddly anti-climactic. Shouldn't I at least have to sign something? I go outside and wait in the sunshine. Ben doesn't come and doesn't come and I phone home in tears to say that he hasn't come and I'll get on the bus and Annie says don't do that I'll ring him and find out where he is and stay where you are and for heaven's sake don't get on the bus because he said he'd come and he will. Just as she phones me back to say he's not answering his phone and I start to cry some more and she says it's probably because he's driving I see a car that looks like his swing round the corner and I cry even harder because now I'm going to have to tell him that I've been coughing so much I've wet myself and how can I sit on his lovely clean passenger seat with wet pants? He turns out to have a black bin-liner in the car, so I sit on that instead.
I tell him what I did, and about Rose who was really Peggy, and he tells me about a friend of his Nan's who was taken to hospital and forgotten about for five weeks until somebody wondered where she was and went to look for her and when we get home I give him some petrol money and he comes in for a cup of tea and he and Joe discover that the PS2 (or is it 3) is broken, and Annie goes out shopping with her boyfriend.
I have a cup of tea too, and a cigarette that hardly hurts at all so I have another one. I also have the cleanest toilet in the country.
