“You’re nearly thirty!”
“You’re not young anymore!”
“It’s all downhill from here!”
So depressing was the thought that at times I felt that hemay as well chop my head off and be done with it. I remembered watching someold sci-fi movie when I was a kid when society did exactly that – kill everyoneoff at the age of thirty. On my gloomier days it seemed like a perfectlysensible idea.
By the time thirty actually did roll around I’d had a wholeyear to come to terms with the situation so the day itself was not too badafter all. It was one of the few birthdays I had enjoyed since becoming anadult. Rob was exceptionally attentive by his standards – looking back, it waspossibly the last year before he had started knocking off the neighbour becauseafter that he basically didn’t bother.
Once I had settled into my thirties I came to quite enjoythem. The whole decade stretched out in front of me, seemingly full ofpossibilities, which at that time included the very realistic prospect ofmarriage and babies. I came to realise that thirty was no age at all, not inthe modern world.
Then the years flew by, and suddenly here I was hittingthirty-nine with another sword hanging over my head. This time the terrifyingprospect of being forty was looming on the horizon. That was practicallymiddle-aged. I thought back to when I was twenty-nine and how worried I had beenabout that. It all seemed quite laughable now. I hadn’t been much more than akid, really.
Now I was about to hit forty and what had I achieved in thepast decade? Diddly-squat, that’s what.
I had gone backwards, if anything. I still had the same job,but not the same boyfriend, who I foolishly had believed might want to marry meand be the father of my babies. Now I didn’t have a boyfriend at all.
My sex life was laughably non-existent, confined to my ownsolitary fumbling over countless unfulfilled fantasies and missedopportunities. As for my biological clock, that wasn’t so much ticking asbooming out like Big Ben’s bongs as they heralded the dawn of yet another year.
Under the circumstances there was no way I was making even atoken effort to celebrate the dawn of the final year of my fourth decade. Somepeople were making a big deal out of it being the end of the first quarter ofthe century.
Where had all that time gone? It seemed like the Millenniumhad only just happened. It was all so depressing that when the holiday periodroster was being drawn up at work, I was the first to put my name down.
Working four nights in a row was no sweat to me. I did itall the time. What did it matter? Without kids or a partner it wasn’t as if Iwas missing any quality time with anyone.
New Year wasn’t the most pleasant time to be working in thehospital, but with the consolation of a week in Lanzarote just over a weekaway, I wasn’t particularly bothered. It wasn’t as if I was in A&E oranything – working in there on New Year’s Eve was, by all accounts, anightmare.
Up on the wards, we just picked up the fallout. Some ofthose admitted through A&E found their way up to me. Many of them were theworse for wear due to drink – either imbibing too much of it, or being assaultedby someone else who had. It was like this most weekends so I was used to it,but at New Year you could double it and then some.
The first such individual didn’t even wait until New Year –a particularly unpleasant man who had nearly lost an eye in a pub brawl on the30th. He was under the impression that swearing at the nurses was a good way toget what he wanted – as he swiftly found out, it was not.
He was typical of the drunks we got from time to time whoseemed to think it was acceptable to get lippy with us. It was something I justwouldn’t stand for. Having a go at people in the pub is bad enough, but abusingthe trained healthcare professionals trying to patch them back together was waybeyond out of order.
It wasn’t unheard of for these dregs of humanity to evenassault the staff, and following an incident the previous year, we’d had panicbuttons installed on all the wards. Working for the NHS could be a thanklesstask at times, but as they say, somebody’s gotta do it.
In my early years of nursing, I found these drunken, leeryarseholes intimidating, but over the years I had learnt to give as good as Igot. Anyone trying to backchat me soon got put in their place and there wasvery little they could say that would faze me. What did affect me was the othertype of patient we saw more of at this time of year than any other.
I’m talking about the suicide cases – those poor, desperatesouls who for whatever reason can’t find the strength in themselves to faceanother year. It certainly puts my trivial New Year woes into perspective.
Thankfully, up on the wards I usually only get to see thesurvivors. If they make it as far as us, the vast majority do live to tell thetale. But I’m well aware that there are plenty more out there who won’t befound in time.
This particular New Year’s Eve had featured examples of bothtypes of cases. It was the third of my four nights and by dawn we had four newpatients on my ward – one with alcohol poisoning, another one who had beenglassed in a fight in a pub, the second such case in as many nights, andanother who had been beaten to a pulp in an argument over whose turn it was ata taxi rank.
The fourth was a single mother in her late-twenties who hadtaken an overdose of painkillers.
What had driven her to do that I didn’t know at this stagebut I hoped I would find
