Page 7 of In Sheets of Rain

“Still out cold in her room.”

“Lead on, then,” Cathy instructed, sounding more authoritative than I had heard her yet.

It was all about appearances, I was learning. Look like you knew what you were doing and the public believed you knew what you were doing. Of course, most of the time, we did know what we were doing.

But knowledge and actions were two different things. Something else I was learning.

The patient was lying on the floor, surrounded by blankets. She was breathing; her chest rising and falling in a slow and steady rhythm.

“How long did she seize?” I asked.

“Donno, do I? Just heard a sound, came in here and she was fitting, and then she stopped, like, a minute, I guess, later.”

I took her pulse. Steady at eighty beats per minute. Her blood pressure was one twenty over eighty. Respirations fourteen and steady. She didn’t respond to voice, or touch. Cathy attached the electrodes and printed out a strip from the ECG machine.

The girl wouldn’t wake up.

“I’m stumped,” Cathy admitted a minute or so later.

“Load and go?” I asked.

Cathy bit her lip and then shook her head. “I’ll see if a Delta unit is nearby. Long way to hospital from here and she could code.”

Cathy stepped out of the room, while I slid in an IV as a precaution. The girl still didn’t wake up. I looked around the floor for drug paraphernalia. Nothing stood out to me, but I wasn’t an expert or anything.

Wind against the window. The flickering light of a TV. Old tobacco smoke and the stringent scent of weed. The girl breathed steadily.

Cathy came in and said, “Delta 10’s on his way. They sent him as backup and forgot to tell us.”

Two AOs on a truck and no paramedic, it made sense.

“Busy night in Comms, maybe,” I said instead of voicing that.

“Yeah, or someone fucked up.”

It was sometimes a bit of ‘us and them’ where the dispatch centre and road staff were concerned. Nothing heated. But definitely present. You were only an ambo if you worked the road. In Comms, you were call staff.

And woe betide anyone who crossed over from here to there.

It just wasn’t done.

I shook my head and made the patient comfortable, but it wasn’t a long wait for the operations manager to turn up.

I heard his voice before I saw him; recognised the tone of it.

“Ah, shit,” Cathy said under her breath. “It’s Ted.” Our station manager who sometimes rode the Delta 10 SUV as backup.

“Ladies,” he said, stepping into the room. “What have we got?”

I gave him the history and vitals, as Cathy crossed her arms over her chest and glared at nothing. I wasn’t sure what had got her knickers in a twist but then Ted reached forward, pressed his knuckles into the patient’s chest, hard, and made the poor girl leap off the floor swearing blindly.

“Shit. I knew it,” I heard Cathy mutter.

“Pseudo seizure,” Ted declared not a second afterwards.

I stared at the patient as she scowled at our station manager—fully conscious and not in the least postictal—and felt about an inch tall.

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Ted said to me a few minutes later, outside the address as Cathy packed our gear into the rear of the truck noisily. “You’ll get to recognising the signs soon enough. Your partner, though, should have seen it sooner.”