It’s way past midnight when she comes in, half-drunk, high on drugs and screeching in pain. We’ve seen tons of people like her before, and most of the staff don’t bat an eyelid. She is, in all ways, your typical Friday night patient. The only thing that makes me wince is a quick glance at her age. All of a fragile, vulnerable 17, younger than anyone I know. I’m new enough at this that some things still hit a raw nerve.
I look over her records. Pretty impressive for someone that age. Along with multiple hospital admissions for various alcohol-related problems, she’s also had several terminations of pregnancy and run-ins with the law. They’re starting earlier and earlier these days.
She’s writhing in bed, a shivering, shaking, incoherent mess. Her eyes are tearing up, the thick eyeliner and mascara running in unsightly miniature rivers down her heavily powdered cheeks. Her hair, a bizzarre shade of white-yellow, reeks of sweat and smoke and beer. Her arms and legs are cold and clammy, the scars of previous self-harm episodes still evident. She is painfully thin, so tiny curled up in a fetal position, that it’s easy enough to spot her as the child she is and not the woman she is trying so hard to be.
Her boyfriend, a hulking, scowling giant, is trying to intimidate me into giving her something for the pain. He looks at least 40. If things were what they should be in this world, he would be jailed for paedophilia. We quickly and efficiently evacuate him.
She clutches her tummy and screams in agony. Out of breath but determined, she begs me, between shrieks and tears, to put her out of her misery. I examine her, as carefully and professionally as I can, and maybe it is the cool, impartial touch of a sober person, or maybe it is the imposing presence of Nurse No-Nonsense behind me, but she soon falls silent. Her eyes, though, hunted and hurting, never leave my face. “Help me,” she pleads through parched and cracking lips. “Help me, doctor. Please help me.”
I try to forget all that is wrong with her, all the things she stands for, all the things I disapprove of. And I try instead to remember that we have done this to her- this society I have helped to create and am still contributing to.
I see her again in the morning after the pain is well over. She is sitting in bed playing with her phone and the mask is back on. Impassive, expressionless, vacant, she barely glances at me when I ask her how she is.
I think of the girl with the terrified eyes, the eloquent pleas, the pale thin hands gripping mine as if I was the only thing keeping her from a fate she dared not imagine, and I wonder where she went.
Feels like we lost her in a sea of make-up and careless friends and older men’s embraces.
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