Free Salter, Anna C by Fault lines

probably the last twenty-four hours.
    I looked down at the Kleenex box in my hand, trying to understand what had just happened. It just looked like an ordinary Kleenex box. I started to put it down and froze. There, on the table, sitting behind the Kleenex box until I picked it up, was the problem. I flashed back to my office. "Mummy," she had said, and I had thought she had been calling for her mother. Boy, the things people tell me that I just don't hear.
    It was a simple thing sitting there on the table. You'd find it in anybody's house, in every hospital. Most people thought of it as a reassuring thing to have around. It was nothing really, just a large, ordinary roll of adhesive tape.

9

    Suzanne had the big problem, of course. Once Camille showed up at the ED, she was Suzanne's responsibility, and Suzanne couldn't exactly put her on the street in the shape she was in. She could leave her in a treatment room for hours and hours —I'd seen that happen—but it was going to be more than a few hours before Camille came back to earth.
    We called Harvey—neither of us thought a neighbor was likely to know much about Camille's friends or relatives — but neither of us knew anybody else to call. There wasn't anybody else we could think of who even knew Camille, and Camille was now too out of it to answer any more questions.
    The call to Harvey yielded zip. Camille had hardly spoken to him or his wife, and Harvey could not remember ever seeing anybody go in or out of Camille's house except her. Dog or no, somehow Camille had to be admitted, at least temporarily.

    There was a huge fight with the powers that be. I took as much of the flak as I could —Suzanne was a shoo-in for chief resident next year if she didn't alienate the entire hierarchy first, which this little episode might. In the end we came up with a compromise. Camille was going into a twenty-four-hour bed. Some psychiatric beds were reserved for short-term crisis patients, and those beds were only available for twenty-four hours at a time.
    Keeter got special attention. She was not to leave Camille's room the entire time except to be walked outside. I wondered who was supposed to walk her, but decided against asking. At the end of twenty-four hours, if Camille wasn't able to leave the hospital and go home, she was to be committed to the state hospital. Let them deal with the dog, seemed to be the administrative point of view.
    Suzanne and I just looked at each other. Neither of us mentioned to the "risk-management" person we were dealing with that Camille would never meet the criteria for commitment. These days to be committed you had to be actively homicidal or suicidal —and that meant have the gun in your hand and your finger on the trigger—plus be mentally ill. Camille was certainly ill enough but not planning on killing anybody, although both Suzanne and I were both considering it at this point.
    Suzanne and I had a different plan. We thought the dog was more committable than Camille. Maybe if she wasn't better after twenty-four hours, we'd just commit the dog and Camille could go along.
    It had taken us the entire day, and all we had bought Camille was twenty-four hours in a safe place to put herself back together. Neither of us was surprised. It was always tougher dealing with the hierarchy than the patients.
    "Keeter," I said sternly when I left, "keep your cool. Do not cause any trouble. No snacking. Not one little obsessive-compulsive disorder. Not a single major depression."
    As I left I passed the resident coming in to take over for Suzanne, who, mercifully, would finally get to go home and sleep. "Watch out for the antisocial in 102," I said as I passed him in the hall. "Mean as a junkyard dog."
    I stepped outside in the cool spring darkness and glanced at my watch. Eight o'clock. It wouldn't be light this late until June. I particularly hate winter, where you go to work in the dark and come home in the dark. There was a reason God said, "Let