"They be another cleaning strike for sure", nurse Mkebi nodded to herself, locking up the pulse-oximeter, tympanic thermometer and other small, high-value items that seemed to vanish when Keith or Nigel was brought in, and pulling on double latex gloves. "Ogúm and all the Orixás protect us!"

Still whimpering through lips like bloody bicycle tires, Terry was anxiously shepherded into Casualty by Angela with Keith and Denise in tow. Johanna, the nurse who-looked-like-she-would (and did), stared in surprise, and hustled him ahead of two very pregnant teens with bright red and blue striped hair and a black leather boy nonchalantly bleeding from several stab wounds, and shouted out: “Doc, doc! Third degree burns to the mouth!”

Dr. De’Ath poked his head round the door of Triage; “Hold him a minute, I still have a foreign body in a rectum here . . . oh my god almighty!”

Other heads popped round corners to look. Miles the-always-exhausted-orderly emerged from his torpor with a slow: “Wow!”

Keith, in passing, rubbed up against Johanna, though without letting go of Denise.

She slid deftly away – the pustulent acne was off-putting: “Only the patient and one family member”.

Sgt. Clarissa Cranberry was flat on her back in Observation in a rigid protective collar and, under a disposable blue hospital gown, a chest brace that prevented her from turning to confirm what she distantly heard. The opioid analgesic that Dr. De’Ath had generously applied, mostly to himself, was not enough to dull a spasm of horror at the sound of Terry’s voice trying to make his muffled explanations understood through Angela’s interruptions.

Clarissa struggled to sit up. “Don’t let him near you”, she explained to the failed suicide with bandaged wrists in the next bed, “Or you’ll really wish you had succeeded.” Grunting and puffing, she swung her legs over the edge of the bed and pushed herself upright.