Chapter 4: Bombeiros

There were no beds available at Santa Maria Hospital. No bed ready for recovery meant no possibility of surgery. But even if there had been room, by the time I had arrived at the ER late Sunday afternoon, there were already nearly a dozen patients with similar broken bones in line for orthopedic care. Waiting at Santa Maria without a bed apparently meant that there was no food served beyond what the nurses could pilfer from the training/snack room. There seemed to be no staff assigned as go-to people for the purgatory crowd—it was catch as catch can. Without a bed, security protocol prohibited any belongings at all; in the absence of distraction, hours warped into one long, vague stare. However, the one thing you could get was pain meds. So I had a steady stream of them flowing into my arm. I had to find another hospital.

My characteristic make-it-happen style was severely undercut by the situation. No cell phone, no familiarity with the city or its health system, no local language skills, no one at the hospital available to work with me on the problem, no physical ability to leave my gurney, and a stark choice between debilitating pain or lulling medication—these conspired to make me very stoppable. Fortunately, while I glided on the hallway gurney like an ailing swan, Eirik and my mother (in the US) were my frantic webbed feet paddling underwater 24/7 to identify a hospital with a bed and obtain insurance approval. Eirik and I had agreed that he and the kids would proceed South without me and that he would come the next morning before they left town to help me transfer to a different hospital.

Since I was deprived of phone and watch, a prominent clock on the wall became my compass. As morning gave way to mid-afternoon with no sign of Eirik, I began to worry. I watched Ana’s handsome partner find her, whisper with her for 18 minutes, and kiss her passionately before leaving her weeping on the gurney. I side-eyed the green scrubs guy, and I begged a buttered roll off a passing nurse. I watched young trainees assemble in the training room like too many clowns into a small car, and then file out 56 minutes later. I waited two hours and twelve minutes for a shot at the bed pan in the all-purpose consult room. Finally, Eirik appeared at my gurneyside. “There you are!” he said in pained frustration, “I have been trying to get in here for hours, they wouldn’t let me in, and then I couldn’t find where you were.” I told him I had been concerned since it was well after 3 pm already. “Not it’s not,” he said. I pointed to the clock. “Oh,” he said glancing at his watch, “that clock is way off.”

The good news was: a nearby private hospital had been identified and approved by insurance, and Santa Maria was already preparing my discharge papers. The bad news was: how would I get there? Neither Santa Maria nor the new hospital could provide an ambulance, and I was in no shape to catch a cab. Eirik had called every ambulance service on a list provided by the Santa Maria front desk, but the majority of them spoke not one word of English, and the few he could communicate with had no availability. A passing angel (and bilingual nurse) offered to call around on our behalf and managed to find one company that could send an ambulance in a few hours. Eirik and kids extended their stay in Lisbon by a night; he left to go care for them, promising to meet me at the new place; and I drifted back to the hallway with hope in my heart.

I awoke with a start when my gurney jerked. Near me were two militaristic bombeiros, listening energetically to instructions called out by someone down the hall. They wore matching costumes: red and black jumpsuits with reflective yellow stripes and firemen’s insignia, black boots, Covid masks and matching berets permanently cocked to one side. One was so tall that he had to stoop to pass under a door jam in the hallway. The other was short, squat and smiling broadly behind his mask. At first, I thought someone was being arrested or the bum clock had caught fire. But then I realized: these were my knights in shining armor. Twenty-four hours after my arrival at the Santa Maria hallway, I was off to new hospital horizons.