At about 10:00 am this morning someone buzzed my apartment.
On the other end was a woman’s voice, very weak and shaky, “Call 911 for me, I need to go to the hospital.”
Wanting to assess the situation first, I went downstairs and there was a young woman, in distress indeed, barefeet, wet muddy clothes, snot on her face....
She said she was epileptic and was having seizures. Being just 2 minutes from Royal Jubilee Hospital, I said I would drive her.
Once in the car, Emily said she was very thirsty. It twigged on me that she wanted alcohol to ease the withdrawal from a pretty extreme drinking binge.
At this point, I was committed to driving her to hospital, so I said I couldn’t help her with the drink but we would be at the emergency entrance to the hospital in just a minute. When we pulled in, she said “I’m not allowed in there.” “ Why not?”, I replied, thinking she might be a hypochondriac who would go every day if she was allowed. “I got in a fight and they barred me.” Still, I had made a commitment to take her to hospital, and she needed help that I could not give her so I carried on to VGH. To make a long story short, when I dropped her off at VGH, my beautiful new leather upholstery was covered, not in mud, as I had originally thought, but you guessed it...

When I got home I pulled on a pair of disposable rubber gloves, grabbed a couple of clean rags, windex and a scrub brush and cleaned the car. To finish off, I put the rags and brush in the washing machine, added a scoop of soap, and didn’t add any other laundry. I didn’t want to contaminate my clothes with the filth. Made myself a cup of coffee, and carried on with my day.

I’m just glad that yesterday, when I went to purchase sheepskin seat covers, they didn’t have the ones I wanted in stock so I ordered them, to be delivered next week.