Have you ever seen those Facebook memes that prompt you to check off the things you’ve done in your lifetime?
The list, presumably someone’s perception of the good, the bad and the ugly that would constitute a life well lived, usually consists of things like being married (check), been expelled (nope), travelled overseas (check), skydived out of a plane (nope) through to macabre offerings like ‘seen a dead person’ (nope, thankfully) Although I’ll never completely fill the criteria given my fear of pain rules out getting a tattoo, I recently upped my percentage of life event coverage by checking off an often-featured item – riding in an ambulance.
There are very few scenarios where travelling in an ambulance is a desirable outcome. You are presumably accompanying a very unwell loved one or you are the unwell. Short of being fast-tracked to hospital to deliver a baby, getting to ride with lights and sirens as research for a feature article or having paramedicine as your chosen career, no one really wants to be in one.
This event was brought on by some sudden-onset chest pain in Sydney cab between the CBD and the airport, headed home to Melbourne after a work trip. No one really wants to have a conversation with a cab driver about the potential need to pull over and summon emergency services whilst on a major arterial in the Sydney peak so I breathed heavily and sought Google’s advice about how many minutes it would take to get to the airport.
My normal airport arrival process generally involves making a very rapid beeline to the check-in kiosk. Most who know me are aware that my #1 obsessive trait by a country mile is my determination to get to the airport absurdly early for any flight. Even having arrived early, I’m never satisfied until I’ve checked in and cleared security in case some administrative snafu consumes my contingency. This time my sights were set on an impressively chic Qantas customer service officer, to whom I somewhat sheepishly suggested I needed a first aid officer or a medical centre. She summoned a first aid attendant and a bench seat near the perimeter of the departure hall, just a tad too close to a coffee outlet.
The moment that a larger-than-life first aid officer appears and starts to unpack a surprisingly capacious bag of first-aid tricks you start to morph from a person quietly feeling unwell to a focus of interest for easily distracted travellers and high-vis-clad airport staff on a coffee break. At this point it was only ad-hoc attention as I tried to look like all I needed was a band-aid for blister after a day in a pair of ill-advised stilettos. His patter about ‘people of our age’ and the saga of his own rampant diabetes, was likely aimed at distracting me from the chisel in my chest but failed in its quest. What was also evident is that no one trains a first aid officer in discretion when their patient almost blows up the blood pressure monitor.
“yeah, well it normally reads high, but NOT THAT HIGH”
At this point an ambulance was summoned, the nice Qantas lady obtained me a glass of water and told me not to worry about my flight as there’s one every the half hour until 10pm so I’d still likely get out that night. The first aid chap, having dug out an aspirin that proved incapable in solving the issue was still tapping at his BP monitor screen as if to Morse-Code it into providing a more reasonable response.
Ambulance officers have an effortless look of utter competence. I don’t know how they pull it off but it’s universal. Mixing it with members of our emergency services is a pretty foreign experience for me. I’ve been a innocent customer of a roadside random breath test many times, but they still leave me instinctively guilt-ridden even if I’m three weeks into Dry July. The closest I’ve ever been to a firefighter is the view of a 2018 calendar in Auntie Lorraine’s spare bathroom. I was last in the hands of St John ambulance staff as a teenager, after some projectile vomiting that resulted from my reckless attempt to prove I’d grown out of genetically-gifted motion sickness by taking on a spinny amusement ride.
A bit of chit chat and then I’m horizontal on a stretcher in a moment that is now right up there on my ‘most mortifying’ list – a corporately dressed woman being wheeled out of Sydney airport in full view of airline peak commuters on a Wednesday afternoon, with my carry-on bag tagging along. I can only imagine the thoughts of the spectators….too many chardonnays in the Qantas Club? The new face of the Opioid crisis?
I’m currently in my Julia Gillard phase when it comes to wardrobe; as well as a commitment to being ‘ deliberately barren ‘ we share an obsession for white jackets designed to distract the gaze upwards, strictly accompanied by a dark colour from the waist down. Despite a long history of coveting Louboutin shoes, I always felt that the signature red soles were a wasted flourish, destined to be face down on the pavement for the bulk of their service to womankind.
Not if you are horizontal on a stretcher.
The inside of an ambulance is abnormally well-lit and features compartments labelled and organised to a standard that would make Marie Kondo weep with joy. A quick ECG that suggests I’m probably not having a heart attack but apparently isn’t definitive and the nice ambulance chap asks me if I need to call someone? I figure it is time to call my husband and when asking for some details (like which hospital I was headed to) nice ambulance chap gave me his #1 tip.
“Best not to lead with I’m calling from an ambulance”
En-route to the hospital we were held up by a traffic accident, at which point I was feeling a bit fraudulent given if I was having an actual heart attack I’d probably be dead by now, and quite open to offering up my spot if there was a curb-side pedestrian bleeding from a gaping head wound. But there wasn’t, so I was shortly deposited in the backroom of a hospital which was busier than Sunday 1am at Swanston St Maccas and exhibiting a similar demographic.
I was taken to a room that seemed nothing like any episode of ER that I’ve ever seen and was also disappointingly devoid of any scrub-clad George Clooney types. My ECG chest stickers got another run. I went in for a chest X-ray. Apparently something more definitive thatn ‘pfft’ is required as an answer to the ‘could you be pregnant?’ question which is a precursor to being blasted with X-rays. The attendant was clearly unable to hear my ovaries laughing out loud at the concept.
On the offchance that what was ailing me was gastric in nature, the doc handed me what they call in the biz a ‘Pink Lady’. This was some kind of pink liquid antacid, dosed with a local anaesthetic. If this shut down the pain it would mean that this whole palaver was nothing more than a dose of dodgy over-chilli’d ramen which would really be next-level embarrassing.
Following on from the grand tradition of my interactions with coloured drinks with cocktail names, it wasn’t helpful.
After all of this at the hands of a very young doctor, they rolled in the big guns – a very distinguished older gentleman who looked like his career began well before Dr Google, with plenty of runs on the board.
He looked at my chart and declared that we were the same age and things like this simply started to go wrong once we hit ‘our demographic’. Clearly I’m losing touch with how I’m ageing.
He decided to do an ultrasound of my heart, with a swoosh or two over my other organs to rule out gallstones or other such incursions. I really wanted to ask how my liver was looking given it had been subject to some battering over the journey but for fear of the answer being ‘a lovely shade of Rosé’ I remained mute.
It was determined to possibly be a thing called costochondritis which is rat-cunning in its ability to mimic heart attack symptoms but is treatable with OTC painkillers.
Although I’d been in the hospital for about eight hours, my discharge was at odds with Sydney airport’s runway curfew and I had to kill about four hours before flights resumed the next day. Here’s a tip – classy airport hotels don’t take 2am booking requests from slightly groggy sounding women very seriously.
‘Fully booked ma-am.’ Times four.
The budget version of an already three-star chain (yes, this is a thing) was able to honour my request. I was advised that the regular $99 rate wouldn’t be available to me and I’d be stumping up $129 – presumably a $30 premium to offset the side effects of accommodating a female who’d possibly had one too many espresso martinis and might be toting a rowdy sidekick after a big night out in Paddington.
But it was just me, a woman still covered in ECG stickers, with nothing more potent than a non-alcoholic Pink Lady and a couple of ibuprofen on board.
They don’t put that one on the Facebook bucket list.