The other day I crawled from my living room to my bathroom to answer a call of nature. I remember washing my hands on my knees afterwards – that was the moment I understood something had gone seriously wrong. My body, already worn down by a Long COVID flare that has followed me since 2022, had stopped being negotiable with me. I crawled back to the living room and called an ambulance.
I recognised, with a strange kind of clarity, that I was in danger.
The ambulance took about fifty minutes to arrive. I lay on the floor and picked up a magazine article about soy sauce – something small and ordinary to hold onto while everything else felt enormous. I thought about what might happen if I passed out before help came: that paramedics might have to break my door down to reach me. I pictured it more than once. I accepted it as a possible outcome. That’s an odd kind of peace to make, alone on a floor, but I made it.
When the ambulance arrived, I made it to the door myself, with great difficulty. Opening it brought an enormous wave of relief – followed almost immediately by trepidation, when the crew mentioned how busy the hospital was that day.
In the ambulance, flat on my back, I felt every bump in the road land directly in my joints. And somewhere in the middle of that pain, the EMT and I ended up singing “Mad World” together. Neither of us quite started it – we both did, at the same time. It remains one of the strangest and most human moments of the whole ordeal: two strangers, meeting in a song, while one of them was in genuine crisis.
At the hospital, a nurse commented on my Star Trek: The Next Generation t-shirt on the way in. Small kindness, register kept intact.
Then the wait began. Eleven hours, from ambulance arrival to actually seeing a doctor. A waiting room that was extremely hot and extremely busy, with chairs that seemed engineered to be as uncomfortable as possible for people who were, definitionally, all unwell. I tried desperately to reach my sleeping sister by phone. Not being able to get through to her was, honestly, existentially horrific – a specific kind of alone that goes beyond simply being alone in a room. It’s being unreachable to the one person who could reach you.
She saw my voicemail notifications about an hour after I arrived. When she got to the hospital, it felt like being rescued by Supergirl.
At one point in the waiting room, an Irish man who was clearly in the grip of a severe mental health crisis – fixated on death, with an intense, thousand-yard stare – began harassing my sister and me. It went on until hospital security and nursing staff stepped in to manage the situation. It was frightening in the moment, but it also underlined something about that waiting room: everyone in it, in one way or another, was in crisis, and the system meant to hold all of us at once was stretched far too thin to do it well.
Somewhere in that waiting room, gallows humour crept in – nurses talking about The Last of Us and The Pitt, a show literally about an overwhelmed emergency department, while living through a version of it themselves. It wasn’t despair. It was people staying human inside something exhausting, the way healthcare workers often do.
I don’t have a tidy conclusion to offer. What I have is what happened, told in order: the crawl, the calculated call for help, the fifty minutes with a soy sauce article, the song in the ambulance, the small kindness about a t-shirt, the hour of silence, and then not being alone anymore.
That’s the account, for whoever needs it, including future me.
– written the day after, for the record.
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