Blame it on Mum

One tequila, two tequila, three tequila floor. As I picked Steve up off the bathroom tiles I used some toilet paper to wipe the trail of vomit from his face. "Can you hear me?" I asked him. There was no reply. "Give me a hand" I called out. Two of Steve's friends came forward and helped me drag him out to the car. "What're you going to do sir?" asked Dan. Dan had been with Steve the whole night, helping celebrate Steve's fifteenth birthday. "Hospital" was all I replied. Dan wisely didn't say anything more, he knew he would be facing the wrath of the headmaster once Steve was taken care of.

The emergency room staff didn't have any luck trying to rouse Steve and the discussion turned to whether or not he needed to be intubated. By this time I began to use my nursing skills as an administrator of medicinal pain to try and wake Steve up.

By squashing fingernails, rubbing my knuckles across his chest and a bit of pressure applied to the inside of the eye socket, I managed to rouse Steve up. He woke with a start, and even though "What the fuck?" were the first comprehensible sounds he'd made since losing consciousness, it was good to know he could be woken and wouldn't need intubation. With the help of some intravenous fluids and a lot of poking and prodding, by the end of an hour Steve was sitting up in bed talking to us.

I eventually took Steve back to the dorm where he lives. I had the help of the headmaster as well as head of his dorm. As I tucked Steve into bed he whispered to me,"Why aren't they yelling at me?" referring of course to the headmaster and the dorm head. "There's plenty of time for that later. Let's just get you better" I replied."I don't wanna go home, they'll kick me out, won't they." I didn't give him an answer, "We'll talk about it in the morning, you just need to sleep" I said instead. "Mum doesn't care, I'll drink more at home" he said, "She lets me drink." I turned out the light and walked out the room, pondering Steve's words.

To cut a long story short, Steve was asked to leave the school. It was his third drinking offense in two months, although this was by far the worst. His mother came to collect him, and this is when things became worrying.

"Did you smell it?" asked Shelley "Or am I just imagining it?" I shook my head, "No, you're not imagining it, I smelt it as well. Spirits, I think, strong spirits" I replied. "And that was no German accent, she was slurring her words. She was drunk. She drove here as well."

We never heard from Steve again, although I think he made it home alive, at least there were no reports of serious road accidents in the newspapers. A child had been sent home with his mother who was at least mildly intoxicated. So what did we do about this.

We looked into the legal issues of working in a school in Europe, whose child is from another country. We could have called child protection services, but as this is considered a non-urgent case, it would takes weeks to get dealt with, and even an urgent case could take days. By this time the parent and child has left the country, flown back to Germany, USA, Turkey, Saudi Arabia. The country is always different, but the outcome the same because we have no power. We lost another child, in all the ways that a child can be lost.