Monday, March 21, 2016

The Vanishing Act

The hospital is a busy place. I started my clinical hours in the ENT ward last week and so far things have been going pretty well. Freddie works in the ER just one floor down for me and I pop in every once in a while to say hi and see if there's anything interesting going on.

ENT is a quiet little ward that consists of four rooms of patients, a nurses station and a room where the doctors examine the patients. The staff is nice and the patients accommodating. Alas, its not the most interesting ward in the hospital.

Things in the ward this morning were as riveting as they usually are. We took blood pressure for some of the patients and followed the doctors as they made their rounds. When the morning routine was done with they sent us down to the clinic to see how things were going there.

While I was walking past the ER to get to the clinic a little old Romanian woman was making her way into the hospital. The little old woman hobbled over to the reception desk and waited patiently as a file was opened for her. File in hand, she continued her journey to the entrance of the ER to wait for someone to come call her in.

I sat in the clinic watching the ENT doctor work. In between patients we chatted, she told me that she had been in the field for thirty years and was happy to share her knowledge and answer any questions I might have.

While I was sitting in the clinic looking at patients vocal chords Freddie was in the ER calling for a patient named Atilia. A petite older woman standing with her shoulders hunched and looking like she was in quite a bit of pain raised her head in response to hearing her name.

Atalia was an older woman in her 80's. She had broken her leg earlier in the year and came in to the ER today with a fractured clavicle. She was noticeably in pain and walked very slowly. Freddie took her by the arm and led her to get an x-ray.

This is where things started to go wrong. The little old lady with a painful fracture never returned from the x-ray. She simply vanished.

When the doctor received the results from the x-ray he went to find Atalia so that he could give her the diagnosis and prescribe some pain medications. Except, she wasn't there. After waiting half an hour to see if she would turn up the staff grew concerned and began to look for her.

All of the hallways and bathrooms near and around the ER were checked but there were no signs of the little old lady.

While the search for Atalia continued, I made my way back to my ward from the clinic. After my shift ended I went down to meet Freddie in the ER so that we could go home. I asked one of the nurses that works with her where she was and they told me to check the security room at the entrance of the hospital.

I walked into the security room and found Freddie and some security guards watching footage of the entrance to the hospital from earlier in the day. They quickly filled me in and we all stood there staring at the screen trying to find Atalia.

It was almost like playing a game of "where's waldo" except the picture was constantly moving and Atalia was a short little old lady that couldn't walk very fast and had a broken clavicle. At one point we watched some of the footage backwards and it looked like everyone was being sucked out of the hospital by a freak storm of some sort.

We watched the footage for at least half an hour but couldn't point out our leading lady. Eventually they spotted an older women that came in to the hospital around the same time as Atalia had and they decided that it was her.

I'm still not entirely sure that it was her in footage. My theory is that she magically vanished into thin air. It seems much more believable than any other alternative.

In any case, there's an old Romanian lady on loose so be sure to lock your doors!

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