Facing our fears

When all the alarms are going off

The last two months since I jammed my index finger on my right hand in a car door have been quite a journey. I have been incapable of doing a lot of the activities I normally do with a cast on my right (dominant) hand and lower arm for the last seven weeks. My husband, Alan, has been a saint and mostly cheerful – even with the extra load on him.

At first, I was positive and determined to make the best of the situation. I did some art and taught myself to write (very naively) with my left hand but I grew sick of this about the three-week mark. I read a few books but not as many as you might imagine. A few friends visited and because (just for added punishment) I developed painful sciatica in my right leg a few days after the accident I’ve been on a merry-go-round of physiotherapy and doctor’s visits. I now have two physiotherapists – a hand one and another who is advising me on my back issues.

I did think to myself that I might be becoming what they call ‘frail elderly’. You hear the advice so often as you get older that you need to do exercise for strengthening because “one fall can lead to a slippery slope downhill with your health”. My friend, Kate, poo-poohed that idea. 

“Lee you are only seventy. Wait until you are eighty to start thinking like that!” Good advice. I was buying into some very self-limiting thinking. I’m good at that.

I read somewhere that back issues can stem from repressed anger. I don’t consider myself an angry person – more just an overwhelmed one. I told my friend, Anna, that I was using this time-out period to “sort out all the long-standing ‘stuff’ I haven’t yet dealt with in my life”.

“Isn’t that what alcohol is for,” she said. We both laughed.

“Yes, but sadly at this stage of my life, I can’t do much alcohol. It’s very dull!”

At the Hospital's Outpatient Hand Clinic last Wednesday the fire alarm went off, followed by a broadcast announcement: “Please ignore this alarm. This is just a test. I repeat is just a test of the alarm”.

My lovely hand physiotherapist sighed.

“Yesterday we had a full fire drill,” she said, “and it was such a rigmarole herding dozens of injured, elderly and disabled people down seven flights of stairs. A couple of staff had to stay behind with some patients who would have found it too difficult to manage the stairs.”

As she washed and massaged the fingers on my hand, she reminded me once again to relax my hand more. I told her that in my first year working as a librarian (a mid-life career change) I had overseen the evacuation of patrons from the Hobart Lending Library following a bomb threat. It was a Saturday morning and the library was very busy. I received a phone call from the foyer desk on the ground floor to let me know a call had just come in saying there was a bomb in the building. I was to immediately evacuate everyone on the first floor down the stairs and out the front of the building. A Fire and Emergency crew were on their way.

The building’s deafening alarm started up and I felt my heart rate rising. It was a time when there had been a series of public bombings overseas so I guess I could be forgiven for feeling anxious. The staff on the floor with me were very efficient; we knew what to do as we’d been involved in a recent emergency drill. Some members of the public were disgruntled they couldn’t take the books they intended to borrow outside with them but we managed to get them moving.

We ushered the last people down the stairs and out the front entrance doors as the emergency crews arrived. I went back upstairs and was doing a last check of the floor when a big burly fireman in a full safety suit and breathing apparatus appeared and asked me to unlock the door to the adjoining tower building. I remember my hand was trembling so much I could hardly get the key in the door.

Next, I went into the Public Ladies toilets on the first-floor landing outside the Lending Library. I knew other staff had done this already but I thought I'd check again. It was lucky I did as the last cubicle was shut with the ‘Occupied’ sign showing. I shouted out: “There is an emergency in the library and everyone needs to leave the building right away.”  

Out on a walk at Tinderbox nursing the hand.

There was no response and, of course, I immediately imagined the worst-case scenario: THE BOMBER AND THE BOMB WERE IN THAT TOILET!  Just as I was yelling out again, this time in a somewhat quavery voice, a fireman came in and told me to go downstairs and wait outside the building – he would deal with the situation.

Minutes later he came out with a young woman, who sauntered off down the street.

“She’s deaf – totally deaf – and didn’t hear a thing”, he explained.

Ten minutes later we were told that the building was all clear. “Luckily, this was just a hoax. You can go back into the building again.”

That Saturday morning in the library was one to remember. It gave me a good excuse to buy wine on the way home. It also gave me a lot to reflect on.

Firstly, I will forever think about deaf people’s needs during an emergency. Standard protocol is that if there is an occupied toilet and you get no response from verbal communication you should pass a sheet of paper under the door with a written message on it. The second thing I reflected on was that I really need to get a handle on my tendency to escalate so quickly to worst-case scenarios and ‘bad-othering’ assumptions.

Telling the physiotherapist this story made me remember the incident and what I learnt from it.

Sometimes we need to be reminded of some of life’s lessons over and over again …