Yrsa Sigurdardottir - Someone to Watch Over Me

‘Thanks. I’m coming.’ Glódís put on her most pitiful expression and continued to rub her neck. ‘I’m dying of pain. This is never going to go away.’

‘Take a painkiller.’ The woman vanished from the doorway without showing any sign of empathy. Glódís had further to go than she had hoped, particularly if this lawyer started raking everything up again. Glódís had to ensure that this wouldn’t happen; she was afraid she would just be fired. Cuts inevitably meant a reduction in staff and she would probably be among the first to go. And what then? There were few jobs available in the recession and unemployment benefits were low and didn’t last long. She knew the requirements for disability benefits well enough to be able to take advantage of her back injury and receive them, but they were next to nothing. She did have a few contingency plans, though; for example, knuckle down and perform so well that she made herself irreplaceable, contact the union and get them on her side, or play the trump card she was saving until all other avenues appeared closed. That time could very well be approaching.

For the moment, however, she had to make an urgent decision. Should she tell her superiors about the lawyer’s visit and the possible reopening of the case, or keep quiet? It would of course be worse if they found out about it later, worse still if they discovered she had kept it secret from them. On the other hand, any hope that this could turn out to be a flash in the pan would be gone if she opened her mouth. Glódís had trouble concentrating due to the pain in her neck. She let her head roll onto her shoulder and shut her eyes. With a concentrated effort she emptied her mind of worries. This self-consolation didn’t help much, however, since it merely cleared the way for other more troubling thoughts and memories. Look at me. Look at me. Look at me. This repeated itself continuously until she opened her eyes.

Glódís wiped away a tear that had slowly formed. It made a tiny wet spot on the back of her hand, which disappeared quickly but left behind a grey mascara streak that would have been almost invisible if she weren’t aware of it. This reminded her uncomfortably of her job as the centre’s director: it had lasted only a short time, but had managed to leave behind a black smudge on her soul. She straightened up and went to the meeting.

The nurse knew he was forgetting something, but couldn’t think what it was for the life of him. His shift was ending and this wasn’t the first time that he’d had this nagging feeling at the end of the day. His job was hectic and it was impossible for him to finish everything; more often than not he had to put off visiting patients and spending quiet time speaking with them, as he would have preferred to do. The strictly necessary tasks had to take precedence, and in recent days the lack of staff had meant that these were divided between fewer pairs of hands. He wasn’t actually worried that he’d forgotten something important; he’d administered all the necessary medications and those who’d been scheduled for examinations or x-rays had gone and returned. No, this was something different.

‘How’s your stomach?’ He bent down to an old man hunched in a wheelchair at the edge of the corridor. The man had obviously embarked on too long a journey and not made it to his destination, wherever that was.

‘What time is it?’ His pink gums shone. His dentures lay in his lap. Every word was accompanied by a wet smack.

‘It’s almost four o’clock, my friend.’

‘Are you the doctor?’ More wet smacking, and the final word was such an effort that a tiny bit of saliva ran down the man’s chin.

‘No, I’m the nurse, remember? I took your blood pressure earlier.’ He positioned himself behind the wheelchair. ‘Shouldn’t I help you back into the lounge? Then you can watch TV before dinner or enjoy the view outside.’

The old man’s sinewy neck cracked when he attempted to turn his head around to look at the nurse, but he could only move it far enough for one eye to briefly meet his gaze. His expression was one of doubt and mistrust, but the young man had long grown used to this from very elderly patients. These people were from a different time when nurses had all been female. In any case, his number was diminishing, and the nurse had never been offended by their suspicion or let it get on his nerves. Sometime in the distant future he would probably be sitting in an advanced version of the same wheelchair, looking with yellowed eyes at new, changed times that he didn’t understand. He rolled the man’s chair into the lounge and positioned him so that he could choose between watching television or gazing at the life that passed by outside without him.

The duty room was in order, so it wasn’t the tidying or finishing up of paperwork that had been bothering him. A medical record rested on the table and he picked it up to put it back in its place. No one could say that he left his work behind for the next shift. The file fell open and a piece of paper slipped out. He grabbed it as it fell and at the same time as he noticed the female handwriting he realized what he had forgotten; he didn’t need to read what was written there to remember it. He had forgotten to call a developmental therapist to speak to the poor young girl in Room 7, as his colleague Svava on the evening shift had requested. He hurriedly dialled the internal number, but there was no answer. That was not a good sign. It was almost four o’clock and developmental therapists didn’t provide round-the-clock service. Damn it.

There was nothing for it but to pay the girl a visit and see whether he could do anything himself. As far as he knew, no doctor was expected until after his shift ended and in any case there was no guarantee that a doctor would be able to accomplish any more than he could. He would at least have to try to communicate with the girl so that he could mention this at the shift change later – if in fact there really was a problem. The note had mentioned a rapid heart rate and anxiety that might have been due to a nightmare, but it was necessary to find out whether something preventable was troubling the girl. It was extremely tricky to deal with patients who communicated with difficulty or not at all; only they could describe the majority of their symptoms, which made any diagnosis a thousand times more difficult than usual, if not impossible. This girl was the worst example of this problem that he had ever encountered, and the department was not properly equipped to handle these kinds of cases. So he couldn’t rely on previous experience to communicate with her, and he had to admit to himself that he’d spent as little time with her as he could get away with. There was something about her complete lack of mobility that disturbed him. He hoped for her sake that he was alone in feeling this way, but deep down he knew that this wasn’t the case.

Inside the room a faint beeping sounded from the EKG machine, which the girl had been hooked up to after the incident yesterday evening. The day’s readings had already been collected for the doctor, who would look in on her after dinner. Someone else would have to go over the information that was currently trickling out, but for the moment he was grateful for the monitor because the diligent needle that moved continuously across the paper showed that there was still life in the girl. There was hardly any other evidence to confirm this; her slender body lay virtually motionless beneath the blanket and you had to concentrate to notice the feeble movement of her chest, which barely moved when she breathed. The girl stared up at the ceiling and appeared not to have noticed his arrival, though he knew that she could hear perfectly well.

‘Hi, Ragna, how are you doing?’ He walked up to her and took her pale, bony hand. A needle had been inserted into a cannula in the back of it and he suspected that half the weight that now rested in his palm belonged to its pink plastic casing and the large bandage that held it in place. The bandage must have been bound round the cannula as automatic procedure, because there was no risk of the girl bumping her hand or knocking the needle against things that she touched. Her hand didn’t move unless it was moved. He stroked her hand carefully around the edge of the plastic, knowing that she had full feeling. What an awful, awful existence.