Three Sides of the Same Pain

I watched a man fall apart in a hospital corridor this week, and I watched a system fall apart around him. He was in his eighties, Middle Eastern, still standing straight and proud, with the spirit of a tiger. That's how I'll think of him here: the Tiger.

The Tiger was in pain. He believed he had been sent to the wrong department and given the run around, and now, at 4:30pm on a Friday, the department had closed. Then a nurse pulled up his information, and when he was told his next appointment was seven months away, in December, he let his dissatisfaction be known.

Then he said the words that should stop anyone in their tracks.

"I'm going to kill myself tonight. The pain is too much."

I don't know if he meant it. What I do know is that it doesn't matter to me. Statements like that get treated as real until proven otherwise, not the other way round.

He took out his phone and photographed the department and the staff, to complain later. Staff can ask someone to stop, but they generally cannot force a deletion, although that's what was threatened. The photographs became the spark but the real fire had been lit months earlier, in a letter giving him a date he could not accept.

Security was called. Three uniformed guards arrived, stab-proof vests and chest cameras intact. The Tiger, the nurses and security were all seeing the same moment through three different lenses, and none of them were wrong.

That's the part that's hard to sit with. Everyone in that corridor was right. There was no villain to find, just the weight of holding three truths at once.

I stepped in. Right there because I felt for him, an old man, alone, in pain, now in a stand-off against four nurses, and security who he said looked like ICE agents. Nobody seemed to be holding the whole picture. I didn't intend to take a side, just tried to slow things down and to get him heard without letting the situation tip further. The nurses were doing a job that is incredibly challenging, and they were clearly trying to help him too. I acknowledged what he was feeling, and made sure someone clinical knew exactly what he had said about that night.

Security offered him the PALS service as a route to complain, but it runs as an online process, and the Tiger said he didn't know how to use it. To their credit, the guard found a paper version and offered to help him fill it in. By then, the Tiger had lost interest. Watching him, it became clear that what he actually wanted, what he needed, was attention and human interaction, not a form.

Before he left, I gave him my number. Some may think that was the wrong instinct. Compassion without boundaries can put you in a dangerous environment if you are not careful. I am not trained to deal with someone who is genuinely suicidal, and I had no experience here, but I can give him my time, and listen, and speak with him if he needs it. I don't regret that decision.

I left that corridor angrier for the Tiger than sorry for the nurses, and I want to be clear about why. It was because nobody was there to help him or answer his questions at 4:45pm on a Friday. Also did he have family, if so where were thgey? Where was anyone who might have known he was alone with this? Where was the team that should have still been there after four o'clock, for exactly this kind of moment?

I don't excuse anyone who abuses nursing staff, and I never will. But an elderly man in real pain, with no one beside him, found out his only outlet was a form he didn't know how to fill in. He deserved a better way to be heard than that.