She almost didn’t knock.
Jen stood outside her housemate’s door at ten past midnight, one hand raised, listening to her own mother’s voice in her head. She’ll be right, love. You’re always making things bigger than they are. Her mum had a gift for this, the cheerful dismissal dressed up as reassurance. It had seen Jen through scraped knees and broken hearts and, apparently, had followed her into adulthood to whisper at the exact wrong moments.
She knocked anyway.
Her housemate appeared in thirty seconds, still half-asleep, and Jen explained as quickly as she could. Surgery a week ago. Something felt different tonight. A heaviness she couldn’t reason away, low and persistent, like a sound she could feel but not quite hear. She’d been lying there monitoring it for an hour before she admitted to herself that she wasn’t going to sleep.
“Give me two minutes,” her housemate said.
No questions. No sighing. Just two minutes. Jen felt something loosen in her chest that had nothing to do with why she was going to hospital.
While she waited, she did what everyone does: she opened her phone. She found the Canberra Health Services page and looked up wait times at North Canberra Hospital. She still thought of it as Calvary, the way most northsiders do, the old name worn smooth from years of use. The live wait time wasn’t showing that night, which told her nothing. But the page told her something else: that this was the right place for a concern like hers. That Walk-in Centres around Canberra handled the less urgent things, the twisted ankles and the fevers that wouldn’t quit, open until 10pm. That if she was genuinely unsure, Healthdirect ran a free advice line at 1800 022 222, any hour, no appointment needed. She wasn’t unsure. She was just scared to be right.
She grabbed her phone charger without thinking, and then, almost as an afterthought, she photographed her medication list on the kitchen bench. A habit she’d absorbed from somewhere, a stray piece of advice that had stuck. She wasn’t sure why she’d started doing it. It just seemed like the kind of thing you should have.
In the car, she told her housemate they didn’t need to stay.
“I’ll be fine once I’m inside,” she said. “Seriously, go home. I’ll call you.”
She meant it. She was embarrassed enough about the asking, and grateful enough about the not-making-it-a-big-deal, that she wanted to settle the debt quickly. Her housemate dropped her at the entrance, watched her walk through the doors, and drove away. Jen didn’t look back.
The ED was busy. Not frantic, not crisis-movie busy, but the steady low hum of a place that never closes. She checked in and took a seat, and within a few minutes a triage nurse came to find her.
Jen had expected to feel judged, or quietly assessed for whether she’d earned her place in the waiting room. Instead the nurse just asked questions. What happened. How she was feeling. What the surgery had been. Jen answered clearly. When the question about medications came, she held up her phone, and the nurse smiled faintly, like she’d seen this before and was glad when people came prepared. The photo had everything: names, doses, timing. It meant the nurse could record it accurately while Jen sat still, not rummaging through her memory at midnight like a bad drawer.
Blood pressure. Temperature. Heart rate. The nurse was gentle and efficient and moved through the assessment with the ease of someone who had done it ten thousand times and still, somehow, cared about this particular time.
Jen was given a category and moved through to wait for the doctor.
The waiting was its own thing. The ED doesn’t dim the lights at night. It can’t afford to. The world outside had gone quiet but in here everything was still fully lit, and Jen sat in that strange suspended brightness and thought about her mum, who would have told her she was fine, and wondered what it meant that she’d stopped believing that voice so completely.
The doctor arrived with rumpled hair and a clipboard and the particular energy of someone who had been awake for a long time and was choosing not to mention it. He was younger than she’d expected. He was, she noted somewhat involuntarily, quite nice-looking, in the way that exhausted people sometimes are, all soft edges and directness. She felt immediately ridiculous for noticing. What is this, Grey’s Anatomy or something. Certainly not, this is Canberra.
He sat down, not stood, which mattered somehow, and he explained what they were looking for. A post-surgical bleed, if one had started, needed monitoring. It might be nothing. It might be something. The only way to know was to check, and then to watch, and the watching took time. He said it plainly, like it was information she was entitled to, not a favour he was granting.
“You were right to come in,” he said, before he left.
She held onto that.
Around 2am, something shifted. Not dramatically, but enough that she noticed, a small change in the way the discomfort sat. She flagged it to a nurse before she had consciously decided to.
“I just wanted to let you know,” she said. “Something feels a little different.”
The nurse noted it immediately, came back to check on her again. This is the thing nobody tells you about being in an ED: you are allowed to say this. You are supposed to say this. The staff can only know what you tell them. Updating them when something changes isn’t being difficult. It’s being useful.
Her concern was warranted. The risk was real, even if the outcome was good. She was admitted for observation, eased into the particular uncomfortable limbo of a hospital bed at 3am: a television she didn’t watch, lights she couldn’t block out. She wished, distantly, that she’d thought to bring ear plugs.
By morning she was okay. Not flooded with relief, not dramatically okay, just quietly and solidly okay, the way you feel when the thing you were afraid of turned out to be manageable and the people looking after you turned out to be good at their jobs.
She’d been given instructions. What to watch for. Who to call. When to come back. She understood all of it.
Her housemate picked her up just after nine, pulled up at the entrance without ceremony, asked how she was, and drove her home. Jen said thank you. Properly, this time.
Before she fell asleep that afternoon, she made a note in her phone.
Three things she’d tell anyone heading to an ED, or going with someone who was:
Ear plugs and an eye mask. The lights don’t go off. The noise doesn’t stop. If there’s any chance you’ll be there overnight, these make more difference than you’d think.
Your medications list, as a photo on your phone. Triage will ask immediately. Having it ready means one less thing to carry in your head when your head is already full.
Your phone charger and a snack. Waits stretch in ways you can’t predict. Running out of battery alone in a hospital at 2am is its own kind of miserable. But don’t eat anything without checking you can, but it is good to be prepared.
She thought about her mum’s voice and decided it was useful, just not in the way her mum intended. It was useful the way resilience is useful. The way a locked door tells you something matters on the other side.
She’d knocked. She’d gone. She was fine.
If you need help in Canberra
Not sure if it’s an emergency? Call Healthdirect any time, free: 1800 022 222
After-hours GP care: CALMS is open when your regular GP is closed: calms.net.au
Less urgent injury or illness: Walk-in Centres in Belconnen, Dickson, Gungahlin, Tuggeranong, and Weston Creek, open 7:30am–10pm daily, no appointment needed, free
No transport home? Ask to speak to a social worker before you’re discharged. Hospitals can arrange the ACT Patient Transport Service or a taxi for you.
*Name changed for privacy.
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