24 Hours in A&E

Seventy-year-old George is rushed to A&E with a piece of driftwood stuck in his left eye. He was bailing out rainwater from his boat moored on the Thames when he fell and impaled his eye on a piece of driftwood. His partner Irene received a call from George “it didn’t sound like George, it was a muffled groan.” She rushed to the scene to find paramedics attempting to stem the flow of blood from George’s eye: “I nearly fainted a couple of times, it was like something out of a horror movie.” Irene talks about how when she became a divorcee, she thought she’d never find another companion. She reminisces how during a night out in Teddington she noticed George walk in to the pub: “he stood in the threshold and glowered” he was “this huge blokey bloke with a battered face, such a presence.” She plucked up the courage to talk to him and George drove her home in his black taxi. As Doctors carry out tests on George’s eye, they become increasingly concerned about the damage behind the eye and whether he could lose sight in one eye. Irene tells us driving is more than just a job for George, it’s his life. At Heathrow Airport, he spends time in the taxi drivers’ canteen, “playing cards, telling jokes… and if they’re lucky, getting a couple of fares. If he lost his ability to work, it would be devastating for him.” Fifty nine year old Debby arrives in A&E after cutting her hand in her lawnmower whilst removing some grass cuttings. A keen gardener, she won’t let her husband Stephen near the lawn mower: “it’s one of the things I won’t let Stephen do, he doesn’t make straight lines and it drives me crazy.” Debby talks about how she became distracted when mowing the lawn by thinking about her son’s upcoming wedding: “whether my pink hat matched the rest of my pink outfit, whether pink was right anyhow, there’s so much to think about.” She then talks about her other son, Simon who has recently transitioned and is now called Sophie: “there could not have been a bigger challenge that any one man could take.” Debby says that it took time to adjust but that it’s important to accept that “I was his mum, I’m her mum now… I’m still mum.” Eight-year-old Phoebe is brought to St George’s with a pair of scissors stuck in her thigh. She had been cutting up stickers when she sat down on the scissors after accidentally leaving them upright in an armchair. She’s accompanied by her mum Natalie, a mother of four other children, who talks about how she’d always wanted to be like her own mum and have a big family. Squeezed into their small three-bedroom house, Natalie and her partner Brian sleep on a sofa bed in their front room – “we just put up with it and wouldn’t change it, I love being a mum.”