Admissions

13 December, in the year of our Lord 2022

This morning at a half-past 10 a-clock, against expectacion, comes Mrs. Icras, all a-bustle and with two acolytes trailing her voluminous skirts. After brief introductions to Irene and Mandy, we upstairs to my father, she brisk about her busyness.
  ‘Hath he made use of his chamber pot?’ says she.
  ‘Not in the time I have been here,’ say I.
  ‘In that case, his humours will become unbalanced beyond amelioracion,’ says she, confirming my concern. ‘There is no alternative. Much as he might wish it, and though it is our purpose to facilitate it, he cannot remayne at home. He must go to Hospitalle.’
  Whereupon commenced some frantique communication by means of a pocket magick screen, and a Messenger summoned to hie post-haste to the Office of Emergencie Carriages — though seemingly not first without the impediment of an abundance of questions, the answers to which I was privy.
  ‘Pepys…P-E-E-P-S…ninety-two…white…Anglo-Saxon…Protestant, no history of dissention…Royalist…with his wife, and his son is here…’ (Mandy checks with me) ‘…Samuel. No, he cannot make a cup of tea, he cannot even stand…he likes to be called — ’ (she checks with me again) ‘ — Bill…’
  At which point frustracion obliged Mrs. Icras herself to seize the pocket screen.
  ‘Listen, you addle-pated cumberworld,’ she snaps into it, ‘I am Mrs. Icras and this is a request for admission to Hospitall, Categorie Three!’
  A suitably deferencial response clearly received, she paused to take stock, and I perceived that she [appeared] drawn and was stooped for her age, her eyes tired and with dark rings below them.
  ‘They should be here within two hours,’ says she. ‘If they are not, you must call for a ninety-nine nine Messenger. There is no alternative. And now I am afraid we must away to our next invalid.’
  ‘May I offer you coffee before you go?’ hazard I. ‘This job must be hard on body and soul.’
  ‘Coffee? Pernicious stuff! But you have reminded me of the hour. If you will grant me a minute — ’
  Whereupon she reached within her ample skirts and extracted, first, a small flaggon from which she took a large swig, this followed by an item of light glass from which she inhaled a mist that lingered a little around her lips, then a snuff box from which she took a pinch of powder to enhale up each nostril, and finally a pippete containing some viscose, oily substance, a drop of which she placed under her tongue. Eyes closed, she then gave a vigorous shake of her head, shuddered back on her heels and emitted a deep and satisfied out-breath. Drawing herselfe up, she now appeared straight and six inches taller, and as she opened her eyes once more they seemed to have taken on a preternatural brightness.
  ‘That is the combination needed for a job such as mine,’ says she, wagging a finger at me. ‘Red Bull for Energy, vaiping for Peace of Mind, cockaigne for Euphoria and CBD to assuage Concern about the side effects of the other three. Come, ladies!’
  I did think as the team flew out that their leader will not see fifty.
  That done, after comes first the nurse for the District where my parents live, to replace a poultice where my mother has a leaking wound, and hard upon her another Messenger, now from the Specialised Nurse who looks after my father’s Tumour, this time with very good and excellent news — viz., that his most recent sketches from the magick ray Contryvance shew no change, so whatever he hath now, it is not that.
  Then I did sit quietly for a while beside my poor father upon his bed, and explayned gently to him how we must go against his wishes, for his own good, and that an Emergencie Carriage will come for him, God willing; and to my surprise he did aquiesce, all spirit from his argument of these two days gone. And as I looked at him afresh I saw not the determined man of former times, but one diminished by illness, with frailty revealed and weary with the effort of taking breath, and so gaunt that I wondered they needed the magick rays to look inside his chest at all, when they could stand him before a lighted candle and see what they wished to see.
  By and by comes the Emergencie Carriage, therein two burly fellows, Irishmen from their accents, who did manhandle my father on to a chair with some wheels, and thence down stairs and into the street, where it still very cold, with snow and ice upon the cobbles where the weak sun could not reach, and so away.
  They gone, after a late dinner I to the Exchange for victuals and Ibuproffen and, that done, set to ordering the great heap of letters that I had moved from the table, dividing them thus — Finance, Health and Miscillaneous. For supper cooked lasange, which come as a readied meal, but my mother told me she did not like paster, so she only had the mince and we shared a little wine between us. After, the mayde come, my mother fretting that they should not have taken her husband away. Then comes a Messenger from the Hospitalle with some questions from the Emergencie Department, to which I made answers to be returned: that my father was previosely in good health, that he walked to the shoppes, that he needed no frame and rarely used a stick and, most vital of all, that he was caregiver-in-chief for his wife. By return, that in the light of this they will treat him with all the Physick at their disposal, believing him to have a fever of the lungs and some poor working of the Kidneys, though they hope that his humours have not, in the end, been unbalanced beyond amelioracion. My mind eased that I think the correct arrangement reached by the day, at the side of my old bed I kneeled upon the hard boards, and for the first time in many a year (though, God forgive me, it pains me to commit the admission to paper) I clasped my hands together, and sayed a real prayer.