Honest feedback Forum Will Review for Spare Change

                                                                                                                                                                       One                  I must protest that neither I nor the hospital could have foreseen that a patient was going to be murdered, so it is unreasonable to hold us responsible. Yes. Yes, I understand I am under oath and sworn to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth throughout this deposition. Okay, yes, I’ll answer your questions now. Okay, yes, I will begin on the Friday before. The first thing to understand is that I had five patients on the inpatient mental health unit when the death occurred. All five were unfortunately involved to some extent. On Friday, two of the patients were already on the unit. One was Mark Stangler, a seventy two year old male with a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s and the other was Billy Stanton, a twenty-eight year old male in recovery from a methamphetamine addiction. I admitted the third patient on Friday, Francisco Flores. He actually arrived on the unit late in the afternoon, so I didn’t meet him until Saturday morning. No, no, all we knew is that Francisco was thought to be a danger to himself. No, we didn’t learn he was Salvadoran or in the country illegally until later.
Ninety minutes after knocking on his parents’ door, Francisco was hit by a bus. It was his twentieth birthday. Francisco was invited to his parents’ apartment for dinner. When there was no answer to his knock, he called on his cell phone. He stood outside the door, bouncing worriedly on his feet, hearing the phone ring over and over inside the apartment. Nobody answered. He fidgeted, pacing up and down the walkway. He tried to see in the windows, but the blinds were closed. He turned around with his hands on his hips, searching for answers in the faces of the three stories of apartments surrounding the small courtyard. There was no sign. Everything looked normal, but they were gone. He jogged down the stairs and across the grass to the apartment manager’s office.
His parents had lived there for eight years so Mrs. Amundsen, the apartment manager, knew Francisco. She was a stout, round woman of Norwegian descent with straight gray hair rolled into a tight bun. Francisco remembered when her hair was mostly blond. She blinked at him through round oversized glasses. “Oh my, Francisco, hello! Greetings!” she exclaimed. “Good gracious, come in, come in. Don’t doddle there. Let’s not let any flies in, shall we?” Francisco could tell there was a casserole in the oven from the heat and the warm meat and potatoey smell filling the room. “Cookie?” she asked, waving a plate loaded with large sugar cookies invitingly in front of him.  “No thank you, Mrs. Amundsen. My parents invited me for dinner and I don’t want to spoil my appetite.” He crossed his hands in front of him. “That’s actually why I’m stopping by. I knocked and tried calling, but they aren’t in. Did they say anything to you?”
Mrs. Amundsen said, “Sit, Francisco,” and she pulled out a chair at small round wooden table, placing the plate of cookies in front of his seat. “Eat a cookie. I just baked them this afternoon and I don’t want to Sven to eat them all,” she said, referring to her husband. She had a sad and worried expression as she waited for Francisco to sit. Francisco reluctantly sat down. As he waited for Mrs. Amundsen to say more, his leg began bouncing up and down. Mrs. Amundsen waited to see if he’d take a cookie and, when he didn’t, she finally spoke, “Francisco, dear, I’m afraid there was a little trouble here very early this morning.”
“Trouble, Mrs. Amundsen? What kind of trouble?”
“It was about your parents. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They came by at some awful hour this morning. I’m sure I was sound asleep and wouldn’t have known what had happened, but there was shouting. Sven and I put on our robes and went to see what was happening. It was still dark out. These people had no manners, no manners at all. There they were, standing up on the balcony at four in the morning, shining lights all around and yelling to wake up the whole building. Common courtesy I should think would be to wait until an hour when most people were awake.”
Francisco’s voice had a tense edge, “Were they there for my parents? Did my parents or the officers say anything?”
Mrs. Amundsen frowned, “Yes, Francisco, they came for your parents. The agents told us your parents were here illegally. They were even brusque with Sven and me. They said Sven and I might be in trouble for renting to illegal immigrants. I never…” Mrs. Amundsen gave the table a rap and stood up huffily. She put her hands on her hips and gave Francisco an angry look. Then, her expression softened and she leaned towards Francisco, “Anyway, they put handcuffs on your parents and took them away.”
Francisco gasped, “Oh no! That’s terrible!” as he stood up and fretfully ran his hands through his hair. He looked perplexed, his eyes frantically traveling around Mrs. Amundsen’s kitchen as he absorbed the news. After a few moments, his eyes focused on her and he asked, “Mrs. Amundsen, would you mind letting me into their apartment so I could see if they left me a note or something?”
Mrs. Amundsen frowned, “Sven and I don’t want any trouble about this. You and your parents need to obey the law. We need this apartment manager job because Sven doesn’t make enough money working at the auto dealership for us to rent our own place.”
“Mrs. Amundsen, I don’t want to cause you any trouble. My parents always tried to obey the law…”
“… Except immigration laws,” Mrs. Amundsen interrupted.
“They didn’t break any immigration laws. They were undocumented. There is no legal avenue for people from our part of the world to come here and do work like my parents do.” Francisco swallowed and tried not to show his anger. The worry in his voice was plain, however. “If you would please just let me check their apartment, I would appreciate it very much.”  Mrs. Amundsen paused a moment, thinking. Then she gave a single nod of her head, as she whipped off her apron and hung it on hook behind the door. “Okay, Francisco. You betcha,” she answered. “Let’s go up there now and just take a quick look.”
Francisco followed Mrs. Amundsen’s portly figure up the stairs. He looked around at his parents’ belongings. Everything looked normal, as though his parents had just stepped out to run an errand. On the counter was a pencil and his mother’s little notebook diary, where she kept her phone numbers, work assignments, and other information. On the kitchen table were some wrapped birthday presents and a can of cake frosting. But, his mother never went anywhere without her diary. Francisco could not escape the feeling that something was terribly wrong.
Francisco stuffed his Mom’s notebook diary into his coat pocket. He took a deep breath, gave one last look around the apartment, thanked Mrs. Amundsen and brushed passed her, walking quickly out and down the stairs. He accelerated into a run at ground level and didn’t slow until he was almost a block away.
It was a half mile walk west to Nicollet Avenue where Francisco could catch the 18 bus uptown to his own apartment. He was moving quickly with his head down, lost in his thoughts. He realized he might look crazy walking this way through these neighborhoods of neat single family houses, so he slowed down and focused on putting one foot in front of the other, trying to walk normally. He looked around and started walking quickly again. He stopped and turned around, looking to see if anyone was following him. He began running again. At Portland and 66th, there was a new roundabout that hadn’t been there when he was growing up. He never saw the bus that hit him.
* * *
When Francisco woke up, he was lying in a hospital bed. A nurse was standing beside him, checking a tube connected to his left arm and running up to a clear plastic bag hanging on a pole. When she noticed his eyes open, she stopped and said, “Oh, good. You’re awake. I’m going to get the doctor,” and she darted out of the room. Francisco’s head felt like it was stuffed with cotton. It took him a while to get his bearings. He began pulling off the wires attached to his left hand. A monitor above his bed started beeping. He was ripping off the tape that held a needle and tubing sticking into his arm when the nurse came back in followed by an Asian man in a lab coat.
The nurse looked startled as she registered the beeping monitor and Francisco frantically detaching her handiwork, but she responded quickly and pushed his hand away. “Don’t do that!” she said, sounding both stern and annoyed.
“I’m sorry, I have to go!” Francisco said, trying to sit up. “I have to go!”
“Relax, calm down,” said the man in the lab coat, coming to other side of the bed, placing a hand on Francisco’s chest and holding him down with surprising strength. “I’m Dr. Chung. We want to help you.”
Francisco felt weak, the doctor and nurse were too strong. He had to stop struggling. As he relaxed, he felt pain like he’d been punched hard on the upper left side of his back. The back of his head hurt, too. He was so tired. He realized the nurse was adding something to the tube that flowed into his arm. Then he was sleepy and sliding back into unconsciousness.
 * * *
When Francisco next awoke, he was in a different room. The shades were drawn across the window and he couldn’t see outside. He couldn’t tell if it was day or night. He gingerly tried to move and shift, but his arms were strapped to railings on the side of his bed. He could move his legs, lift and turn his head, but with his arms tied down he couldn’t sit up. He was feeling a bit stronger and the pain in his back and his head wasn’t as bad as before. He lay still and tried to remember, his anxiety growing as the memories returned. Minutes or hours passed, he couldn’t tell.
Finally, a man wearing green scrubs entered the room. “I saw on the video that you’re awake,” the man said, gesturing to a camera mounted above the television set on the wall. “I’m the shift nurse. Your sedatives are wearing off.” He checked Francisco’s arms to make sure the monitor wires and intravenous drip needle were still securely connected. “We put the straps on your arms while you were sleeping so that you wouldn’t accidentally pull the IV or monitor out. I’ll take the straps off if you promise to behave.”
“Where am I?” Francisco’s voice was dry and rough. His tongue felt thick and swollen. “What time is it? What day is it?”
“It’s Friday and it’s a little after two o’clock in the afternoon.”
“I’ve been here for two days?”
The nurse nodded. “You were brought into the emergency room at around seven in the evening on Wednesday. You were on the Intensive Care Unit Wednesday night until they decided you were physically okay. They moved you here yesterday.”
“Where is here?” he asked.
“We’re just a medical unit with some locked rooms,” the nurse answered. “Do you remember what happened?”
“I’m not sure.” He tried to sit up, forgetting that his arms were still attached to the bed railings. He lay his head back down and looked at the nurse imploringly, “I have to get out of here. I have things I have to do. I really need to go.”
“You jumped in front of a bus and then you resisted treatment,” the nurse said, staring seriously at Francisco. “The doctors aren’t going to let you go anytime soon.”
“I didn’t jump in front of bus!” Francisco protested. “And I’m not resisting treatment! I just need to leave.”
The nurse looked at Francisco with a frown on his face. “You were most certainly hit by a bus.”
Francisco shook his head in frustration. Maybe it was a good thing he was tied down to the bed because otherwise he felt he might explode with anger. He tried to take slow breaths while the nurse fussed with his bedsheets. When he felt under control again, he asked, “May I have my cell phone, please?”
The nurse didn’t stop what he was working on, but answered, “I’m sorry, but I don’t think there’s a cell phone with your possessions. There were just clothes and a jacket. Your wallet is in your pants, but I’m pretty sure there wasn’t any phone. I’ll check again after we’re done in here.”
Francisco tried to control his frustration. “When am I going to be able to get out of here?” he asked.
The nurse shook his head. “I’m afraid that’s not happening today. You’re going to be our guest for a while. Now, is it okay if I remove the arm restraints? You should know it’s not going to do you any good to try to run away, because the doors are locked and we have security.” The nurse waited, watching Francisco’s response.
Francisco spoke resignedly, “Yes, sure. I’ll behave. Take the restraints off and I won’t try to run.”
The nurse waited a moment, observing Francisco, but then began removing the restraints. As he did so, he explained to Francisco more about his situation, “The doctor has you on a ‘hold’ which means you’re legally under lock and key until Tuesday at the earliest. The best thing you can do right now is to relax and let other people take care of you. We’ve made arrangements to put you in an ambulance and send you out to Central Minnesota Hospital. Pretend you’re taking a vacation.”