It started with silence. Not long ago, my 83-year-old dad – typically a vital, loquacious human – went quiet. Sitting at the dinner table, he was vacant, disengaged. When he did make an utterance, my highly opinionated father was unsure about what he wanted – chocolate or vanilla ice cream, Friends or Seinfeld reruns, Rummikub or Wordle? “I don’t know,” was all he could muster. Alongside this cognitive uncertainty, a physical slow-down. My usually sure-footed dad walked shakily along the flat, kilometre-long footpath between his place and mine. Getting in and out of bed became a nightly challenge; getting in and out of the car, a daily trial. For the first time in his life (and mine), my dad resembled an old man.
The GP thoroughly assessed my father, all but ruling out the fall he’d had two months earlier, when he tripped while walking along one of Mt Albert’s many uneven footpaths. Though he’d bloodied his head and knees when he hit the pavement, the timeframe didn’t match his symptoms. That ruled in stroke or Parkinson’s. An urgent CT scan was ordered at Auckland City Hospital; we’d get a call when an appointment became available. The GP couldn’t tell us how long it would take.
Two days after their visit to the doctor, I called time on my parents’ plan to be patient and wait for a scan to be scheduled. I knew they were terrified of entering the dreaded Emergency Department. Like all Kiwis, we were acutely aware of headlines screaming of endless wait times, overwrought staff, and the likelihood of picking up something nastier than what we’d come in for (miraculously, my folks had avoided Covid for four years). But the cacophony of blaring news stories was drowned out by the deafening sound of my dad’s silence.
“Pack your overnight bag and bring your masks, snacks, and books,” I told my parents over the phone. I’m picking you both up in 10 minutes.”
Eight hours later, after being triaged, blood tested, strength assessed, balance challenged, heart monitored, CT scanned, and endlessly questioned (“Do you know your name/where you are/what day it is/who the Prime Minister is?”), my dad was admitted to the neurosurgery ward. Diagnosis? An acute brain bleed.
The CT scan showed two shadows, each the shape of a mid-sized Hass avocado, embedded in the top of my father’s brain. The culprit? That November fall. Turns out, two months’ lag between trauma and symptoms is common in brain bleeds – that’s how long it can take for blood to coagulate and put pressure on the brain, leading to signs of mental and physical decline. He was scheduled for surgery first thing the next morning.
What followed was a world-class tutorial in kindness, compassion, humility and skill proffered by the most overloaded, under-resourced workers in our pressure cooker health system. For me and my mum, it was also a lesson in patience, trust, and gratitude.
Let’s start with the volunteers. Though no doubt slow compared to Friday and Saturday nights, that Sunday in the ED felt busy. As we waited for the testing, assessing and admitting processes to be completed, I peeked timidly from behind the thin cotton ‘walls’ of our cubicle. I saw an agitated man in his 40s doubled over and yelling for pain relief; I witnessed an elderly woman with a swollen belly groaning in discomfort; I heard granddaughterly whispers from the other side of the fabric that “everything is going to be OK, Poppa”.
I also heard a gentle, singsong voice. “Would you like a cup of tea, my lovely? A sandwich while you wait, my dears? I have egg, cheese, and roast beef!” A tall, thin man approached our cubicle. I learned (because I asked) that Simon is a volunteer with the Hato Hone St John Friends of the Emergency Department (FED) programme. Offering tea, sarnies, tissues and the occasional hug to patients and their whānau, this ED angel brings much-needed comfort to worried Sunday souls. Never has a cup of sugary tea tasted so good.
If Auckland City Hospital volunteers are angels, the ED doctors are heroes. My dad was seen by Dr Calvin Chin, a Kiwi of Chinese heritage who studied medicine in Australia and returned to Aotearoa a couple years ago to “serve his NZ community”. He translated his vast clinical knowledge of subdural haemorrhages into language we could understand: “We’ll drill four holes into the head, insert a couple of plastic tubes, and the blood will drain into attached bags. The surgery will take about an hour.” Our top 10 words? “This is the most common procedure we do in neurosurgery.”
When my mum and I left the 8th floor ward late that Sunday night – with my still-vacant dad hooked up to beeping, buzzing machines monitoring his heart, blood pressure, and oxygen levels – we felt scared but optimistic.
If the ED doctors are heroes, the ward nurses are superheroes. Perhaps not surprisingly, things didn’t go to plan. The next morning’s surgery was delayed. And delayed. And delayed.
For my mother and me, that meant hour upon hour of waiting and worrying. For my father, that meant hour upon hour of increasing hunger, thirst and discomfort. In preparation for surgery, he’d been ‘nil by mouth’ since midnight the night before; by 5pm Monday, despite having intravenous fluids, my mellow dad was getting, if not hangry, then… hagitated.
The nurses were unphased; Malaysian-born Charlotte, Felicia from Eritrea, and Aucklander Annabelle responded promptly and patiently to my dad’s increasingly frequent call-button calls. What’s more, they took care of me and my mother, answering our endless questions, empathising with our frustrations as the wait continued, and assuring us the protracted decision to keep my dad nil by mouth gave him the best chance of having surgery that day.
When the decision to not operate was finally made at 8pm, we faced another challenge: how to get my starving dad something to eat. The dinner service was long over, and the hospital cafes were closed. Somehow, Charlotte activated her nursing superpowers and magicked up a couple of ham and mustard sandwiches, an apple, and two bowls of ice cream. Mum and I are convinced that under her uniform, nurse Charlotte wears a cape.
And then, there’s the kindness of strangers. Brought together through accident and illness, the friends and whānau of hospital patients share an often unspoken, largely unacknowledged bond.
As my mother and I paced the halls awaiting a decision on my dad’s surgery, we met Shay, a mum of four from Whangārei who was also walking the corridors. The day before, her husband, Anton, had gone in for what he thought would be an unremarkable MRI to investigate recurring headaches. He never came home. Instead, he was rushed to Auckland for emergency surgery for a large brain mass.
When we met Shay, she had been waiting 10 hours for her husband to emerge from what was expected to be a three-hour operation. Standing together in the empty hallway, we shared fears and tears; despite her own stress, Shay offered to order my dad UberEATS if no hospital meal materialised. In that moment, a friendship was born. When the double doors of the corridor burst open and Anton appeared, waving weakly from a hospital bed pushed by two orderlies, mum and I hugged Shay. If Anton was why my father’s operation was delayed, we were at peace with him being bumped down the list.
We might have been at peace leaving the ward late that night, but we were also lost. The doors that were open during the day had transformed after hours into walls secured by swipe cards and intercoms that no one answered. When we finally found the lift and made it down to the ground floor (puzzlingly, called Level Five), we were dazed and confused.
As we stepped out of the lift, we realised we had no clue how to find our car. From nowhere, a young man sporting a blue ‘Ask me’ t-shirt appeared. “Can I help you girls?” he asked. “We don’t know where we’re parked!” I wailed, hours of anxiety eclipsing any vestige of composure. “Don’t worry, I can help you find it,” he said, gently leading us through the automatic doors of the hospital entrance. With my weeping mother on one side and wailing me on the other, the young man helped us pay at the machine, remember that we had parked on Level Six, and walked us right to our car.
“But how do we get out of here?” I cried, imagining an all-night search for the Way Out. “You just go down,” said our guide, miming the act of driving down the ramp. “And then go down, and down, and down again, until you reach the exit at the bottom.” As we approached the first ramp, there was our knight in blue cotton, guiding us to the next level. He appeared again at Level Five. And Four. Finally arriving at the ground floor, we saw the glowing Exit sign. We also saw our parking garage guardian, standing at the barrier arm and bidding us farewell. Proof that angels can fly.
When my dad’s surgery finally happened, at midday the next day, it went without a hitch. Right after the op, our North American neurosurgeon, Dr Trae Robison, rang to report the patient was doing well – in fact, as soon as my father woke from the general anaesthetic, he started cracking jokes. “We can’t thank you enough,” I wept into the phone. “I’m just doing my job,” came his humble reply.
And so it goes. Amid staff shortages, political parrying, underfunding and worrying wait times, the job of saving lives gets done – a round-the-clock duty of care performed with unwavering focus and a resolve that seems unshakable.
Our hospital’s angels, heroes, and superheroes shine as beacons of humanity in a medical world darkened by the forces of too little, too late.
Four days after we entered the ED, we left the hospital, my dad pushed in a wheelchair by a Singaporean nurse. As we exited the busy lobby (this time, knowing exactly where the car was parked), we spotted Shay and Anton entering the car park lift. He was walking slowly, leaning heavily on his wife. As the elevator doors began to close, they saw us. We waved to each other, and together, we smiled.
