The Hospital's Littlest Orphan

I'm finally back, and so many things are going on, especially with Mum and Sis being here! But first, let me tell you a story:

The Hospital's Littlest Orphan

She walks into the department and up to the ward clerk, her eyes dead and unblinking. I need to see a nurse, she says. I have taken thirty tablets tonight. The ward clerk lets out a silent sigh and inputs her detail into the screen for the second time that day.

Her name comes up on the Department screen, and the nurses roll their eyes. Not again! they curse under their breaths. She just left thirty minutes ago - what a bloody waste of hospital resources!

She'll wait outside in the waiting room, they decide, and we'll take bloods from her in four hours' time. She can be baby-sat out in the waiting room.

She watches the television flicker in the top corner of the waiting area, trying to make out what the silent moving pictures were saying. Her soft pink pajamas rub against the hard seats of the waiting room, and her glazed eyes look up into the fluorescent white lights which hummed a familiar lullaby to soothe the desperate quiet in her.

She closes her eyes, and she remembers how as a little girl, her Mummy had been really sick. They were in and out of the hospital so often that it was like a second home to her. She tries to remember her mother dying, but time and her mind has smudged the painting of that memory altogether.

She was shifted from foster home to foster home from the age of nine, and actually found a good foster mother when she was eleven. But happiness was never meant for people like her, and just as if life had a point to prove - her foster mother died when she was fourteen, leaving her orphaned once more.

She was completely out at sea then, too old to be fostered anymore; and wandered nomadically from the sporadic foster families who would offer to take her in, but she would act up and not last with any one family too long. She was old enough to feel like a trespasser into the lives of these families and the truth was, she was too afraid to love too much in case they were taken from her again.

Two years passed, and finally, she was old enough to live on her own. Her accommodation was nice enough, but she had no housemates, no friends, and no family. Her impermanent itinerant childhood, where the love of a parent was a distant memory rather than an innate feeling meant that she lacked the social skills of interaction, and had no way of making meaningful relationships.

She cries out to the world, pleading for someone to talk to her, to listen to how her day went, or how she liked the colour green or the sound of buses. No one had bothered to ask her where she had bought her nice new maroon sweater from.

She made five hundred calls to the ambulance one month, and was put into jail for her disruptive behaviour.

Her mind directed her lonely feet to the only other place that was a large part of her childhood - the hospital - and she would visit two or three times a week, sitting in the reception area talking to anyone who cared to listen. When the reception area closed at five, she would wander down to the Emergency Department complaining of some vague symptom to be seen, looking for any excuse to stay.

They would bring her in, initially, treating her like they would any other patient. She loved the questions they used to ask her, as that was the only time anyone even showed a vague interest in her. She hated the feeling of needles and would cry like a five year old with no one there with the promises of lollies if she were brave.

As she cried wolf more and more, the Department became less and less welcoming, sitting her outside in the waiting room, taking forever to see her. That was when she began popping the pills. Thirty, forty five of them at a time. Somehow that made everyone sit up and take notice, and the words I didn't want to live anymore seemed to have a magic effect of bringing on the sympathetic looks of strange nurses and the listening ears of concerned doctors.

Oddly enough, no one cares more about you being alive than when you tried to be dead.

But then she overplayed that card, sometimes turning up to the ED three times a day, and familiarity chipped away at the sympathy of her reluctant extended family of the Emergency Department.

And so she waits in the Emergency Department waiting room, her body shifting about trying to get comfortable on her makeshift bed of hard plastic seats, waiting to hear another human voice call her name.