Far From The Madding Crowd

Sucking on a vape to the mantra of I’m To Old For This Shit like an asthmatic with an inhaler he hid his face from view by tilting his head away from the medication hatch. He lowered his head and blew smoke at the floor. Outside in the garden he could hear a colleague establishing the observation level of the lady they had just jabbed in the garden. She sounded calm despite the fact the woman could not obviously be left alone without eating something she shouldn’t or making advances to the most irritable psychotic man on the ward who clearly hated any form of communication other than lighting his cigarettes.

“Level 3 yes…no within eyesight, you don’t need to follow her round…”, the next seemingly obvious instruction, even though the man from Medacs has already done this for most of the morning.

He sucked less urgently, puffed out his cheeks, logged into the computer and recorded with ample clicks the fact the poor lady circling a crumpled up bedsheet for hours in the garden had been given medication via the most inhumane route. After 30 years of it he had long rid himself of the ethical conundrum of whether that was right or not. Most of the time it seemed to do something that could be considered positive, if you angled your head a certain way.

He ran through a few cursory checks. Did he care what we just did to the lady? Yes. Did he hope the thick medication infused oil would traverse her body from the hive of her right buttock and, the most likely outcome, send her to sleep (which seemed a good thing as she hadn’t for days). Well, yes, or at least help her to sit in one place and feel vaguely calm. Calmness he supposed would always be vague in her mind being as it was, or seemed. He might remember to ask her later, in the coming weeks, when she is able to say what she feels or what she thinks, if she chose to share that of course, but disappointingly, for his conscience anyway, people more often than not did not remember – people in her state that is. There were plenty of states where being held by your arms and being injected was more traumatic than helpful, but those were the kinds of people experience had told him he would not consider doing it with. Thankfully these days he got this right instinctually, though if called to another ward he would sometimes have to go along with the plan of whoever had called him over. Even then he had a tendency to take over, unless it were someone he knew would actually have considered what they were summoning him to participate in.

He winced. That sounded arrogant. And in arrogance errors lay experience also told him. That was what this job was, a series of moral and ethical headaches and never knowing if you get anything right. A moribund cycle of worry you did something helpful that day. On days he considered fruitless in this regard, having merely been a clerk to people’s freedom and having to find another 100 ingenious ways to describe the word no, it could be gnawing,

if he allowed this. These days, thankfully, when he stepped out the building he instantly forgot anything that had occurred during his detention as a caring person, eight hours, sometimes up to fourteen or fifteen and resumed the unedifying life outside where he hadn’t the energy to accomplish anything but sit around overcafinated and buzzing, waiting for his body’s permission to sleep.

“Can I have some PRN?”

He looked up from his vape and secreted it into his pocket.

It was Alice. “Sure…” It was Alice, he wasn’t going to question it as others might. If he had lived her life he would want someone to give him sedatives when times were rough. And anyway he hadn’t the time to go to the quiet room with her and try and teach her how to manage without. He had a student to mentor, a doctor to harass and a care plan to tap out before the end of the the shift; he wasn’t inclined to try and show her how holding an ice cube and breathe a certain way might be useful in the long run, though he knew it probably would. With a couple years practice and rewiring.

He gazed at her eyes, wide and at the end of her tether, they weren’t pleading, she didn’t want it for reasons for addiction or not wanting to make an effort, he quickly surmised, though anyone could act this way if they invested enough into it. She would probably ligature in her room if he didn’t, though some might say that is part of the learning experience, seeing how that in itself is fruitless in the end and one day deciding to do something different. He showed her the screen of possibilities and suggested a combination of sedative and antihistamine. She agreed. Maybe another day he would have the time to do the other thing; though he was not convinced doing that when someone was in an acute crisis in their lives was the most opportune moment to do so, it was the ethos of the service and someone will have had the time to think about all this stuff; he trusted they had, he was a trusting person on the whole. Well they should give me more time he thought, and I will make more of an effort to do it. It was a stated aim of the service, people talked all kinds of things all the time, sometimes these things get written down and reified. Soon it would be something else, as soon as they learn something about the brain that could be percolated into strategies other than telling her to hold an ice cube, or breathing abnormally, strategies more immediately effective so that he could go find his student, who he suspected was outside smoking again.

It was a conundrum, but one Alice didn’t need to think about right now, which she couldn’t he could see, nor him really right then, right there.