I am about two metres from the drug cabinet when I realise the nurses dolling out the prescriptions would well be advised to take a little of their own medicine and then in some pain ridden sense of bliss may they receive insight into how their little routines of busy-ness do not equate to patient care, least not in the compassionate sense.
Such is the nature of the underpaid workers that are proffered by poorer nations, given a uniform and called nurses running the wards at our city's hospitals.
The melodramatic histrionics of a Phillipino drama (or is that drag?) queen staff nurse riding rough shod over patients if they so much as dare mutter a word not connected to the question she is asking is both unnerving and hilarious.
She moves stridently from room to room like a crooked police chief in a third world jail making sure the incarcerated are serving in submission. Patient requests are met with a cold menacing stare, her fingers itchy for the cut throat scalpel resting in her hemline. Hers are the only questions, anything else may prove too difficult to explain to the next shift.
And so it goes for eight hours whilst I sit patiently with El Presidente Snr. awaiting his impending release from the chemical perfume and decaying limb house. We sit dutifully giving benefit of the doubt to the apparent busy-ness of our under praised health care professionals.
That is until the overacting staff nurse dares to question the questions of El Prezidente's father. Suddenly she gets a sense that the real work sitting on her desk -which hithertofore she has masterfully managed to ignore for the best part of her shift- was supposed to have been actioned before she took to her personal Spanish inquisition. However She remains staunch ordering Dad of eL-P back to his room before making herself busy being officious in another part of the ward.
But when pressed and presented with hard copy documents her demeanour changes, suddenly she is the powerless victim of another shift, a lone woman battling the entire beaurocracy of a foreign health system run by despotic doctors. Wouldn't it simply be easier for the patient to return to his bed until the morning.
Needless to say we smell blood. My father has his hand on the paring knife he'd brought in to slice his apples and I am reliving some Kung Fu moves I had seen in the Way of the Dragon back when the bigger kids were throwing Jaffas from the back row of the Delta Theatre. We are now prepared for battle and the snivelling maid in front of us has no idea of what is about to be unleashed on her person if she so much as mentions the words 'I can't.'
We press on our objective clear, our strategy unfolding flawlessly, home in sight.
Suddenly we are watching some camp vaudevillean actress wiping forearm across brow like she's about to feint in some tropical heat. Her sighs grow longer and more pronounced as if the overseer had dragged her out of the dormitory after twelve hours in the field to perform one last unthinkable duty of the day.
She dances around the fax and phone reciting number combinations, name, rank and serial number, tell them nothing. Her nice quiet shift is unravelling and she is now faced with some real descisions. Her troop around her flee for the prescription jars and she is the last woman standing against an insurmountable legion, it is time to pull out the damsel in distress sinking in quick sand wearing nothing but her surrender flag routine, but we're not buying it.
We move in for the kill. My fathers razor tongue slices her story to shreds before it leaves her pitiful pale lips, I am warming up with some leg strecthes across the nurses station reception desk, shadow boxing the disinfected air like Ali coming off the ropes against Foreman.
The shrinking violet had finally shrunk. Her bargaining avenues closed down, her exits jammed with the full weight of the roadblock of truth unfolding across her desk. There is no way back and no way of buying us off.
She hands Dad the self release forms with one final flurry of false tears hoping he will see the error of his ways and resolve to return to his bed until the next shift comes on.
I fly onto the desk, an explosive left warning kick fires quick as Evil Kneivel from a cannon catching the ends of her hair now standing to attention. She quickly finds a pen from the bottom of her barrel of excuses and with the Father of El Prez scrawled on the form in biro for all to see, we shoot her merciless stares reducing her to a snivelling ball of green and white uniform on the refective polished floor.
The doors fly open and we are free to go.
Half way down the corridor we can already hear her barking bilingual orders at some subordinate and stamping her court shoe heels around the rooms of sleeping patients.
