Another July, a few years back, there was a heat wave.

This climate is not set up for heat waves. In some landscapes, the plants can have drama and grandeur even in summer heat. But here the plants just dry up and burst into smoke and flames, the buildings reflect and radiate glare, most residents don’t have air conditioning, and the people on the street can’t think straight.

Here’s me, small ant under big sun, trudging along a couple blocks of open concrete plaza toward the main bus route. Here in the middle of the plaza there’s a bench. Lying on the bench there’s an elderly lady with wasted muscles and pallid white skin. She’s underdressed in an insufficient little frock and one sandal and one large thigh-high medical boot. She has no pockets, no purse, no belongings at all. She just lies there, looking at nothing, and like an infant makes very small languid motions and gestures and facial expressions that don’t match any sights or sounds around her. I lean over to shade her face and start talking to her, trying a few different languages. Where do you live? Where did you wake up this morning? Who can I call? Nothing. She doesn’t notice me standing there. The medical boot slips a bit; the skin looks flaming pink and melting somehow. How did she even get here? How does this even happen?

I run back across the plaza to the campus coffee shop, buy a bottle of water and a banana, and run back trying to coax her to sit up and take a sip. She doesn’t seem to notice the water or know what it’s for. So I use some water to bathe her forehead, and check the yellow plastic bracelet on her wrist. It’s a hospital bracelet with her name and patient number and today as the appointment date, the name of our hospital almost a mile away, and the name of a specialty clinic.

That clinic name is familiar. I was sent there many times to serve as an interpreter for their patients. Then one of their main providers announced that he would no longer work with interpreters because repeated conversations take twice as much time. He informed my patient (single mom, on dialysis) that for future appointments her 19 year old son could skip class and sit in on his mother’s visits and repeat the doctor’s instructions to her later. So that clinic.

The clinic’s receptionist answers my distress call and sounds appropriately concerned, as I recite the patient name and record number on the bracelet. The receptionist puts me on hold, to run a computer search. Then he returns to the call, with a completely different phone manner. “That is NOT our patient.” So I repeat gently that she IS a patient at this hospital, that she was seen today in his very clinic, that she has a record number and a record, and that her care team must be informed asap that their patient is now collapsed and unresponsive. “I suggest you call 911,” he replies, and hangs up.

I call 911 and run across the plaza to flag down the ambulance. Then I stay at the scene to answer questions. I want to take another look at that patient bracelet too. I want to write down the name and number, to document that phone call for the hospital’s patient safety net. (It dawns on me typing this that there probably was an official record made, because the responders planned to take this lady right back to the same hospital, to the ER, maybe for referral to that same clinic.)

The first responders rush over with a gurney, take one look at this lost lady, and they exchange weary incredulous glances. Motioning me to leave they say “Step along, Ma’am.” They mean it.

The two of them shake their heads, putting on their gloves.

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A local bat tested positive for rabies. The bat was found on Friday at the exact corner and intersection where on Wednesday I was standing waiting for the bus. That’s a hectic busy corner with so much hubbub and car / bus / e-bike / foot traffic and trash and dropped food, it’s a puzzle that anybody even noticed one bat in dead or dying mode.  

Neighbor: Bat with rabies, right in our midst. It’s a sign of the end times.

Me: In case we needed yet more signs.

Neighbor: But now the bats are in on it.

Me: Must consult Revelation chapter 23 for further instructions.

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The neighbors enjoy dropping off donation bags at my door and garden. Most recently the gifts included potatoes, onions, spicy cocktail sauce, and heads of lettuce. The great national cyclospora food recall was cause for some second thoughts about the lettuce. I did consider a major lettuce wash-&-roast. Then considered leaving it out for the newest crop of neighborhood bunny babies, but realized that then the wee bunlets would be carrying any cyclospora off to other people’s lettuce patches. Then thought of adding the lettuce to the Wing Family super fancy compost barrel, but then it would go on the Wing lettuce garden. So I dropped the lettuce in the city compost to be super-heated for next year, made potato onion soup, and kept the gift spicy cocktail sauce.

That night, half the floors in the building had a power outage. Our dad with the baby and little kiddos texted me right away. I was upstairs bathed in lights, happily typing on this computer, when other texts came rolling in. The neighbors are confident that my college Russian major equips me to understand what’s going on with the building electricity. It’s bedtime but ok sure. I pocket the gift spicy cocktail sauce because why not, and walk to the lobby with two flashlights to wait for people to grope downstairs and gather around to compare notes on who still has a working fridge and who still has a bathroom light, and is anybody stuck in the elevator helloooooo? and how bout the garage door, we should go down there and see if folks can still drive out and has anybody checked on Alice?

I gather and pack a bag of people’s favorite perishables to keep cold in Mary’s foster fridge. When the dad goes back to help Mom with the kiddos, I pull out and hand him the spicy cocktail sauce. “K-Rations,” he says. “We’re saved!”

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