Would you call an ambulance?

Yesterday we traveled with some friends for lunch at Angas Plains Winery, south of Adelaide. As we set off the weather was mild and quite a few children’s fluffy clouds drifted across the sky. We anticipated a warm, leisurely time under the open verandah at our destination, being plied with tapas-style food and rich red wine. Lovely.

Well, we did eventually enjoy our lunch, but were interrupted repeatedly by something rather bizarre and frankly scary!

As we started our first bottle of wine and ordered our food I saw a couple entering the verandah area, the woman apparently frail and leaning on her much larger companion’s arm. This wasn’t particularly alarming, but then suddenly the male companion was on the ground! I watched as several people rushed over to them and discovered the man must have either passed out for a second or had tripped and bumped his head on a deck chair. They seemed to have things under control, seating the man and woman and moving a table to them for their meal. Apparently the couple were from Berlin in Germany and had driven a hire car from Sydney, NSW over the past ten days, planning on leaving from Adelaide in four more days time.

We got to eating and enjoying ourselves again, suitably distracted from the upset and trying not to have an argument about climate change! Our food selection involved some fantastic sourdough bread, gleaming gold olive oil and a very tasty homemade dukkah. This was followed by a selection of prawn & spice dim sum, some chorizo, chicken & chili kebabs and spannakopita (spinach & ricotta in filo pastry triangles). We succumbed to dessert later, despite having vowed to avoid it as a health hazard!

However, our meal was interrupted again by the wobbly German couple attempting to depart. Sure enough, as soon as the guy stood up, he keeled over. He managed to collapse in a sitting position this time, but skinned both his arms, tore his finger tips and nails on the left and I soon noticed some blood seeping through the knee of his trousers. A crowd of helpers gathered around and managed to keep him seated against the big barn door there as I tried to get some info from the couple. First, I asked the woman if her husband’s medication had been changed recently. “No” she said, “not for years”. [!!] I asked if he was on medication for hypertension, his heart or his balance and I don’t think her English was up to it. She just told me “It’s his diabetes. He’s always falling over. That’s how he is”. So I just told her they ought to take him back to the doctor when they reached home, silently thinking I should really call an ambulance, as the guy looked deathly pale and didn’t seem able to speak.

After cleaning his wounds and staying with the couple a while, the guy wanted to stand up and get in their car, but it was parked about 100metres away in a gravel-covered carpark. This was hopeless, so I got the woman to give the car keys to Spotrick to bring the car right over near the door. After helping the guy sit in the car and recover [??] his faculties, we left them to it, sitting down again to resume our meal.

As soon as the hire car took off, we could all see (and hear) that the guy had left the handbrake on!! He slowed & stopped before attempting to turn left and out of the carpark and we all heaved a sigh of relief that he had discovered his oversight.

But ohs noez!! He roared off again, rear wheels stationary and dragging behind the car, gravel spitting everywhere from the front tyres! Suddenly I was off after them, breaking the world land speed record in my inadequate strappy sandals! I got abreast of the driver’s window, waving my arms and yelling “Stop! Stop!”. For what seemed like ages, he continued to force the car along, speeding up! I found a further burst of acceleration myself and managed to run a bit ahead of him, catching his attention with my flailing arms! 

Phew! He stopped and rolled down the window. I told him & made gestures with my hands to snap off the handbrake and he realised his mistake and drove off OK.

Should I have called an ambulance?

I really thought about calling the ambos as none of us thought that man was safe to drive, but he wasn’t drunk so the manager couldn’t take his car keys legally and I can imagine the fiery reaction! Probably the couple were dead scared that the guy would be hospitalised in Australia where he couldn’t speak the language and no one knew his medical history. His wife was not brave enough to attempt to drive here on the “wrong” side of the road though I think I would have been tempted in her position. Neither person seemed to have any idea that the guy was suffering multiple medical problems besides a bit of Type 2 diabetes and seemed never to have heard the words “hypertension” or “high blood pressure” in English anyway.

I hope they get safely back to Germany, without needing a stretcher and oxygen on the plane! Scary stuff.

Another dream, another toad…

I just awoke from this dream as Evangeline opened the front door, so some of it has been shocked into the subconscious!

The dream started somewhere I can’t remember, but the first bit I can remember is when I was getting into a single bed (rather like my cousin Beth’s bed when we were kids and I stayed with her parents). As I pulled the blankets up to settle down, there was a little twig-like thing on the edge, so I pulled it out and chucked it on the floor. Then some bloke came in to say goodnight (not my Uncle Alan, but a stranger) and was telling me about a slight “pest” problem they’d been having- a few mice and rats in the roof. Then he spotted the “twig” I’d tossed out and pounced on it, saying “Oh no- we must have a bird problem as well… that’s a little, shriveled bird foot!” I wasn’t too alarmed as IRL our cats are always abandoning little birds’ feet about the yard.
So off I went to sleep, unconcerned. The next morning I was in the city with some other people working for some government office. We had to get some lunch and travel to some other site for a meeting, so one of them went off to get some take-away stuff for us to eat on the train. I ordered a hamburger and chips and a soft drink and this guy went off to get everyone’s order. When he came back he had got various hamburgers, chicken, sandwiches and chips, but handed me a barbecue chicken in a bag. I was a bit miffed, but took my bag onto the train and tried to settle down. However, a heap of people got on and crowded us out of our spot near a window- there were several small children, a few older ones and a few extra adults- the little kids just stomped on most of the food- a Macca’s burger went all splatto across the seat, which put me right off!
A while later I got settled elsewhere in the train and opened my chicken bag- BUT-inside covering the whole upper side of the nicely browned chicken was a huge floppy toad, looking quite slimy and stunned! Eeeergghhh!!! I slapped the bag shut as it moved a bit!
I went back to my friends sitting with the kids to show them, but when I got there, one of the toddlers had just got another, smaller, darker toad jump onto his front and everyone was trying to get it off him, while he shrieked! A man who seemed to be the same one as had been saying good night before, said he was the child’s father and that he had been receiving some of these animals in mailed packages for some weeks.
The scene moved then to a stairwell- maybe in a station and I was walking up- as I rounded a corner, a pale green thing wound around a steel brace- it looked rather like a snake! (How Freudian!!!). As it looked rather sluggish as well, I grabbed it behind the head and held on tight, taking it out into a corridor. This turned out to be the corridor of a laboratory building or university. I ran with the “snake” (it seemed to have some rudimentary dinosaur-looking pale green legs at times) into a lab with benches and yelled- “Someone get me a container for this thing!”. Everyone started to scatter and run away- I let go of the now writhing and jerking thing and it hurtled across benches and floor towards the windows. I yelled at everyone to get to the other side of the room and out the door- some hardy types (blokes in lab coats mostly), immediately went to have a closer look at the thing. Somehow I knew it was not particularly harmful or venomous and wasn’t panicked, although I didn’t want it to bite me anyway. A guy came along from another department and said it was the Pale Green Jungle Python from Ethiopia (??!!).
Without much ado, I was back with my colleagues from the train, going to our meeting. We got off the train onto a bus and set off in the rain; (it had been sunny before and overcast). We got off the bus at what seemed like the long boring stretch of Ayliffe’s Road, before it descends past the Shepherd’s Hill Reserve. There seemed to be nothing there except a tall thin Asian man with a briefcase standing beside the road.
Meanwhile it got quite dark, and we’re walking along the road- which now seemed to be in a fairly level suburb with lots of peak hour traffic, rain and traffic lights. As we rounded a corner on foot I noticed that a heap of large gravel was piled up with lots scattered across the lefthand turn lane. Then I looked out into the intersection and noticed that a car seemed to have fallen into a big sinkhole in the road! It was full of people- 8 of them in fact, and had filled with water up to road level! I looked them over and got out my mobile phone to call an ambulance and police- meanwhile one of the passengers stood up (it was a large convertible with top down, in the rain!), and started pressing 000 on her mobile as well. Other passengers didn’t seem able to move or get out so I moved in front of the car to direct traffic/make it stop or whatever, while a colleague attended to the passengers. Suddenly all the street lights and traffic lights went off and it was a bit hairy standing out there in front of the oncoming traffic! However, the cars still had their headlights and I figured my hands would look white in the lights and people would see me waving them about and not hit me!
As we waited for the ambulance and police to turn up, suddenly someone I had seen earlier in the dream in a shocking pink suit, turned up. She had been sent out by some government minister to personally investigate claims that the transport department was letting things go to the dogs, and here she was right on top of a supporting incident! We seemed to know who she was, so we grabbed her and started making her write down our sad tale about the accident, the road condition and the disorganised trains and buses we had been travelling on. Then the front door opened and I was awakened- no more dream!
What the?? Figure this one out!!