By half six, Accident and Emergency had stopped pretending it was coping.
The waiting room was standing room only, although most had slumped to the floor in an exhausted heap. Bodies spilled into corridors they weren’t meant to be in, voices layered on top of each other until it all blurred into one long, fraying noise. Coughs. Complaints. Someone crying quietly into a phone. Someone else shouting into one. The air was thick with heat and disinfectant and impatience.
I’d been on my feet since before dawn and this shift was my second, technically. But as my first had blurred into the nextone, on paper this was really just one long day. Outside, junior doctors stood on the picket lines, placards waved above their heads, hands wrapped around hot drinks or stuffing sandwiches into their mouths. Inside, we had been lucky if we’d had one toilet trip amongst three of us all day. I’d claimed a chocolate bar from a machine for lunch, but now that same machine was empty, apart from a single row of Bounties, sitting there unloved. No amount of desperation in the chaos was going to convince the punters to eat it. And if anyone did, it was probably immediate food poisoning, as they had been forgotten about like a tin of peaches in a fallout shelter.
“Where are we on triage?” I asked an exhausted nurse as I skirted a trolley parked at a stupid angle, its wheels locked because no one had time to fix it.
“Fucked,” she answered, not looking up from the obs machine. “We’re fucked, Soph.”
Junior doctors on strike. Two nurses off sick. One agency replacement who’d vanished an hour ago and hadn’t come back from her break, although I didn’t blame her. Security stretched thin because there was a match on. The early drinkers were already filling up the hospital beds, and the match hadn’t even finished yet. The rest would join them en-masse: red-faced, loud, already drunk.
At reception, voices rose again.
“I’ve been waitin’ four fucking hours,” a bloke in a football shirt slurred, jabbing a finger at the glass. “He went in after me!”
“That’s because he’s got chest pain,” the receptionist said, tight and brittle. “Now please sit down.”
“Don’t tell me to sit down.”
The air shifted, tightening, like everyone sucked in the same breath all at once. I was already moving when the shouting sharpened.
A second man stepped forward, scarf still looped round his neck like a challenge. Words flew between them, too fast and too loud to make sense of. Someone laughed. Someone swore.
“Security,” I called, raising my voice as I pushed through the crowd. “Can we get—”
It happened in a blur.
Amy stepped in before anyone could stop her. Barely twenty-three, eyes too big for her face, hands raised as she tried to calm them down. The man swung without looking, wild and sloppy, flailing like a bough in the wind. Straight into Amy’s face.
She hit the ground hard.
“Shit!” I dropped to my knees beside her, fingers already moving, checking, assessing. “Amy, look at me. Amy.”
She nodded, dazed, blood trickling from her nose.
“Ok, Amy. Just stay nice and still for me. Someone get me a trolley,” I pushed to my feet, my eyes searching the department for a staff member in the sea of bodies.
The drunk man turned toward us, eyes glassy, his face pale beneath the flush.
“I didn’t mean to…” he started.
Then he retched.
There was no time to move. Warm vomit splashed across my chest, sour and acidic, the smell hitting the back of my throat hard enough to make me gag. I clenched my jaw and swallowed it down. There wasn’t room for disgust. Not tonight.
“Get him out,” I said flatly, not looking up. “Now.”
Security finally arrived, too late as usual, dragging him away as he protested weakly.
“Get her to a cubicle,” I instructed the porter lingering beside me, too scared to get involved in case he was the next one punched or puked on.
“There aren’t any, Soph.” His voice was quiet, tired. “We’re full everywhere.”
“Fuck,” I whispered, the sour stench of vomit rising from the heat of my chest.
“Lisa,” I beckoned one of the nurses. “Go find someone I can discharge, please, and sit them back in the waiting room. I’ll get changed then see to Amy.”
One more staff member down was all we needed. I sighed loudly, teasing off my ruined clothes carefully, so I didn’t have to touch the putrid mush. It had seeped underneath my shirt, glistening on my skin with a sticky residue. My hair had survived, at least. The only places it had covered were my chest and a dribble down my legs. Now I wore green scrubs, like I was stepping into the operating room.
