24 hours in A&E

A patchwork of teatimes drift through my car window, and after-school club stragglers slowly follow their noses home. Men at their wheels with tieless shirts, an empty school bus heading to wherever school buses spend their nights. It’s the time of day when the sun’s warmth is the softest, spreads through the house the easiest.

But I spin the revolving door and leave behind all the cues that it’s time to start winding down for the day. I walk into the fluorescent timelessness of A&E.

I’m soon ushered further into the hospital, over colourful arrow stickers on the floor that guide me to a smaller room. There are around 20 seats, arranged in a rectangle around the edges, and two doors in the corner suggesting that there are two doctors on duty.

The seats are half-occupied. It’s not immediately clear what unites myself and the other patients – why we, specifically, were shipped here. But the air is much calmer than A&E; people seem to be battling boredom rather than death. They make small talk with the nurse as she wheels her blood pressure machine around each of us in turn.

Other than that, we’re left to our own devices (literally, thanks to a woman armed with both types of phone charger and seemingly no qualms about a constant rotation of stranger’s phones at her feet).

We inspect each other for signs. For a few, it’s obvious: hand held awkwardly in the air, a finger lost inside a haphazardly wrapped bandage. Within an hour, the woman next to me patiently answers my basic questions about her linguistics degree. I like to think I’ve rescued her from the man sitting to my other side, who asked her, across me, what she was in for.

By the time it’s dark outside (I guess), there’s a core group of us who’ve been waiting since the afternoon. We haven’t shared the usual experiences that bind people together – but an unspoken, static kinship evolves, I imagine, in the same sort of way it would between people stuck in a lift. We sit together in the pure absence of everything except each other’s existential nerves. And some vending machine banter.

We’ve disarmed ourselves to each other in various ways. One man – who told us all in detail about his breathing problems – looks up at every sound and movement expectantly, wide eyes and grin. He’s desperately looking for something, but I can’t work out what. Between coughs, he asks each of us in turn if we plan on going to work the next day, with growing incredulity at how long we’re being asked to wait.

Next to him, a man in a tracksuit is slumped on the floor, doing his best to not look at anyone. At one point, in the absence of any prior exchange between them, grinning man suddenly turns to him, and asks; “What are you in for, then?” Tracksuit man keeps looking ahead and shakes his head. No, he says. Although, a few hours later, when grinning man pops down the corridor for something or another, tracksuit man announces – unprompted – to the rest of us that he’s having stomach pain and funny turns.

The couple sitting opposite me only exchange a few, self-conscious words. But, as the night establishes itself, the woman starts to wince and quietly curl her body closer into her legs. When the nurse comes back for her next blood pressure round, the boyfriend demands some pain relief for her.

“We’ve been waiting for three hours for something. She’s passing out with the pain.”

“No I’m not,” the girlfriend says flatly.

Grinning man looks over, but deems it too risky to ask her what she’s in for.

There are social stakes here. In normal A&E, you’re allowed to look terrified. But here, we’re all working to keep it light. We must – it’s bright and quiet; we’re all too exposed to each other. So I return the looks of faux disdain when the doctors shut their doors on one patient and don’t call in another, and laugh dutifully at the weak jokes.

At around midnight, both doctors leave their offices, walking in tandem to the corridor beyond, swinging their briefcases by their sides. Someone overheard them saying they’re going on a break for an hour.

This really fuels another man – who reveals to us he’s a firefighter. He jokes that the doctors have done a runner – recurrently, for their entire absence (one hour 40 minutes. Grinning man timed them). We sit and wait. We talk about the perks and pitfalls of being self-employed (brought on by grinning man asking someone else if they were going to call in sick from work).

Firefighter throws another joke into the rectangle – which he also keeps alive for the next few hours. Something about how everyone’s here for the same thing, for chopping into their fingers. His injury happened while he was cutting fruit, but I don’t hear which kind. Grinning man asks if he’ll be calling in sick today, laughing when firefighter says it’s his day off. The edges of the room start to blur. I’ve missed bedtime, and now I’m worried I’ll miss E waking up, too. But I keep it breezy, ask the woman opposite me what it’s like to be an interior designer.

When the doctors return, firefighter takes to cheering on whoever gets called into their rooms, and tells them to tie the doctor down. He jokingly admonishes me for not doing so when I return from the doctor’s room and start the wait for a blood test that will tell me whether I have a blood clot on my lung (I don’t). I smile weakly at him, reminding myself that he’s a firefighter, he deserves to have his jokes laughed at.

The nurse comes round for our blood pressure again, and we smile and dutifully hold out our arms. She remarks about our bond. Our shared annoyance at having to wait so long is thinly veiled by an unspoken agreement that everyone’s doing their best.

When I’m called in to see the doctor, he tells me I can go home, but to come back in the morning to wait in another A&E estuary. Can you come back for 8am, he asks. I glance at the clock behind him, which tells me it’s now 5am. I feel like I need to be cool about this; he’s also picked up on the Fun Club outside his door, so I’ve got a reputation to uphold. We agree on 9am. I give the group a little wave as I leave – trying to not look too relieved – and go home for an hours’ sleep.

When I return, I’m directed up to the first floor, to a new room. A few people filter in, and we share respectfully weak smiles. They shift nervously, flitter from phone to book to folding a crisp packet. I sit awkwardly, with a cannula in my arm, finally able to anxiously Google everything the doctors have said to me.

A kind woman wheels around some lunch for us all, which prompts a man near me to start making a joke in my direction. Something about how he’ll nick his wife’s yogurt when she’s with the doctor. Mercifully, at that moment, a man attached to a drip spills water all over the floor. I rush to clean it up, and hope, with every wipe, that the tension has resumed.