P is for Psychiatry part 2
As John was going over the inventory in the drug box, he thought back to what he could remember about that rescue.
When he and Roy had arrived, they found a young woman in her early twenties in apparent distress on the floor of her apartment. She was stuporous and not very coherent when they first found her, and John had done a quick check for broken bones after getting her pulse and respiration rates. They found a small empty bottle of codeine tablets beside her, and surmised that she had made some sort of a suicide attempt. After checking in with Rampart, John put her on a heart monitor while Roy set up an IV TKO.
A dog was barking at them frantically from the kitchen, but the bark had a strange timbre to it. Once the woman was stabilized, John went to check on the animal, which was penned in by a baby gate. The smell was horrible. It looked like the dog hadn't been let out in weeks and there was excrement smeared all over the floor. The poor beast tried to get to the gate when it saw Johnny, but it couldn't put its rear paw down on the floor, and then it crumpled where it was trying to stand, practically sobbing in a human way. Johnny bent down and reached his hand out tentatively toward the animal, and it dragged itself over to him, whining. He could see the dog's hip was displaced, and from the severe swelling he believed it probably had torn knee ligaments as well. It broke his heart to see the animal's suffering, and after he found he could pet the animal without it trying to bite him, he climbed over the gate and filled a bowl of fresh water for it. "Poor old girl," he said to the dog, "you're having a rough time, aren't you?" As he went back into the living room, he said to Roy, "I'm gonna call the SPCA to take care of the dog."
The woman, Christine Douglas, was a bit more coherent with the IV running, and began gushing about how they had saved her life, how they were the only ones who cared enough in a cruel world to consider a fellow human's pain...how she wished she had someone in her life who cared like they did.
John remembered how, in the ambulance, the young woman had begun obviously hitting on him, asking him if he had a girlfriend and what he liked to do on his time off. He had been polite, but had tried to steer the conversation away from himself, and asked her questions instead. She had complained of chest pain and shortness of breath, so he had checked the heart monitor leads and put his hand on her belly to check her respirations. Was that what she considered to be an assault?
He had turned her over to the doctors' care when they reached Rampart, and that had apparently been the end of it. Dixie had updated him and Roy on her condition during a trip to the hospital the following shift. It turned out that she had taken 10 pills - hardly a true suicide attempt. At the hospital it wasn't too hard for her to convince the psychiatrist that she had taken the extra pills by mistake, and that she was really fine, just feeling rather silly for having overreacted to what she had done. She was released the following day, and sent home.
And now, out of the blue, here was this formal complaint. John remembered when he and Roy had been falsely accused of robbing a patient a couple of years previously, and how angry and frustrated he had felt about that. It had looked for a time as if they were going to have to fight for their freedom. They had even consulted a high-priced lawyer to find out their options. Fortunately, the investigating detectives had been very thorough, and had found the culprit – an elderly female neighbour of the victim who had used the opportunity of his illness to do a snatch and grab.
In a way, this was worse. This was harder to disprove, since it became a question of whose word would be believed…there was nothing tangible, like money, which could be found to prove his innocence. He felt like his head was going to explode with all the thoughts that were spinning in it…should he talk to Roy? Would he be allowed to talk to Roy? That would be excruciating, if he couldn't speak about this with his best friend.
The doorbell to the station rang, and John was startled to see it was already 9 o'clock. He had been checking the drug box for almost an hour and no one had said anything to him, or if they had, it hadn't registered. He vaguely knew that Cap must have spoken with Roy, because Roy had stood over him for a few minutes without speaking before he walked away. It didn't really matter. The investigator and the lawyer were here. He went with them into the captain's office, and as the door shut behind them, John imagined he could almost hear the faint 'clang' of a jail cell door.