LITMIR.BIZ

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sometimes almost be a grimace, that we British adopt in socially uncertain situations, and that’s supposed to get us through. After a while, though, even this palled, and began to irritate me as much as fingernails down a blackboard.

      I was also struck by the presence of some extraordinary patients, whose sole raison d’etre seemed to be to wander round and cause chaos. One such was Marnie, an elderly lady who was much given to rambling around (in both senses of the word “rambling”) the “Male” ward dressed in her nightie, asking people what they were doing. When apprehended by the nurses and pointed back to her own bed, she invariably turned nasty, telling them in no uncertain terms how she didn’t like them, and they could go away, in a manner involving concepts of sex and geography(!) She would not have been out of place in 18^th-century Bedlam or Newgate, and she repeated the same performance at regular intervals all day, and every day I was on that ward. A finer candidate for a tranquilising dart in the neck, I never did see.

      The whole ward was full of extraordinary characters, though, many of whom seemed to just wander around at will, including a bloke who pushed a large upright cart full of the morning’s newspapers, magazines, sweets, and bottles of coca cola etc., which he sold to the patients. So you could be assessed for obesity, then celebrate afterwards by buying a toffee crisp, a mars bar, and a tube of pringles. Suddenly, through the throng, came the coffee trolley with one squeaky wheel. I assume that, somewhere in the original Beveridge Report, there is a clause stating that all hospitals must possess at least one coffee trolley with at least one squeaky wheel. This one was ours.

      By far the most bizarre character, however, was the soup man, who came wandering up and down asking who wanted soup. He was actually a member of the catering staff, not just some random member of the public with an interest in soup, but even so… What was perhaps oddest about him was that his answer to the perfectly reasonable question “what flavour is it?” was that he didn’t know. I hadn’t realised, before I was admitted to hospital, the crucial importance of soup to the NHS. It is not too much to say that it has almost a semi-religious significance, so much so that it occupies its own, peculiar, semi-detached status from the rest of the meal provision, at least at HRI. But the most amazing and miraculous thing about NHS soup seems to be that – a bit like the Higgs Bozon – nobody can tell you what it is until after it has been created!

      I think that deep down in the hospital kitchen, they must have something like the CERN large hadron collider, and at the appointed hour, the hospital’s Soup-Priest dons the ceremonial tabard, picks up the sacred tureen, and descends the steps to summon the Soup-Gods. The lights probably then do something similar to “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire”, there is a blinding flash, and he turns and raises both arms to heaven, before proclaiming to the waiting throng “Leek and Potato!” (Is that with croutons, or leptons?)

      My soup-related reverie was distracted by Jim, on the bed diagonally opposite. He (lucky chap) was getting ready to go home that day, and he very kindly offered me the remains of his bags of boiled sweets. Which, apparently, someone had originally passed on to him. It felt like handing on a baton, and we fell to talking about how your horizons got shortened in hospital. He had a fairly high-powered job in the real world, and we got talking about “To Do” lists. I revealed that since coming in to hospital, mine had shrunk to “Have X Ray, Move Beds if possible, Do Poo” and I had only managed two of them so far. Eventually, Jim departed, leaving me as the guardian of the sweets, and I wished him well. Then I returned to watching the endless stream of people still parading past me, through the ward.

      By now, I was getting used to the speed at which things move in the NHS, which has its own time-space continuum, completely different to the rest of the universe. As an example, “five minutes” to a nurse, can be an elastic amount of actual time, anything from twenty seconds to an hour, depending how busy she is at the time, and how many unforeseen extra demands on her time crop up while the “five minutes” elapse. It is best, I found, to cultivate the virtue of patience. To be a patient, perhaps, or at least to be a little patient, as in the old “doctor doctor, I keep on getting smaller” joke. Old jokes were preoccupying me that day, for some reason. The presence of the drip putting liquid into my arm, and the catheter taking liquid out of my bladder, brought to mind the old joke from Catch-22, where Yossarian looks at the casualty in the medical bay, festooned with tubes, and suggests just tying them all together “to cut out the middleman.”

      I spent my second night in hospital lying awake (I found, for the whole time I was admitted, that it is impossible to sleep at night in a hospital, don’t ask me why, it’s something to do with the people wandering about, muttering crazily and farting in their sleep, and that’s just the medical staff, especially the night duty nurses, who carry on their 3AM conversations at daytime pub noise levels, oblivious of people trying to get some kip).

      I was listening to the changing tone of the thrumming of the central heating or something, some huge engine or dynamo deep down in the bowels of the cellars. It reminded me of trying to sleep in a Pullman seat on the night ferry from Holyhead to Dublin, and listening to the engines changing note in the middle of the night as the captain changed course to avoid the Isle of Man. With occasional input from passing drunks (I mean on the ferry, not in the hospital, but you get the idea).

      Saturday dawned with the knowledge that I was to have an Ultrasound Scan that day. By now I had become accustomed to giving my date of birth – you are asked for it so often, in hospital, in fact, that I eventually took to automatically adding it to the end of my name, along with my patient number, as if I had been in the army. I may even legally adopt it, together with “vegetarian” and “not allergic”, as part of my full legal title. They wheeled me up to the X-Ray ward in my bed, and spent a considerable time smearing gel on my distended belly. They then took pictures of my insides. Simple as that. I even looked a bit pregnant. Perhaps I should have asked for one of those little printouts, like pregnant mothers carry round, to show people – “yes, and this is my spleen, ooh look, it’s waving its pyloric sphincter in that one. Yes, the radiographer said I had a cute distended abdomen, or something…”

      The remainder of the weekend passed without any discernible incident. I was returned to my bed, and began to get a flavour of the way the NHS machinery goes into “slow” mode at weekends, with vast acres of time populated only by tumbleweed and passing people busy about some unknown purpose.

      I had also begun to notice the daily routine of the place for the first time. Wake the people up, bath them, feed them, change the bedding, lunch, visiting, tea, visiting, evening food, then go to bed. All of which is one humungous logistics operation, that never stops, interspersed with the actual medicine and healing stuff going on, in unpredictable skeins that could lead anywhere.

      I also noticed all of the different shades of the NHS uniform, and I realised that this was in recognition of the different parts they played in the endless logistics treadmill. The differing depths of the blues in the nurses’ uniforms denote seniority and experience as well, but there are also white tunics trimmed with red for blood staff (or “Flea-bottomists”, as I came to call them) white tunics trimmed with black for physios, light blue for student nurses, pale pink for the people in charge of food orders, except that “Soup” contingent seems to have its own “red” brigade – it would do, of course, soup being so apparently crucial to our well-being.

      Then there are the green-clad cleaning company. I mean “company” in the Medieval, rather than the corporate sense, and this connection in my mind was what finally unlocked the key to what it was I was actually watching - It became obvious to me in that instant. The whole place was actually a monastery or “infirmary”, in the original medieval “Hospitalling” sense of the word. Still being run to fixed hours, with all sorts of differing pilgrims, visitors and inmates, and staff with defined duties.

      Some of these, the kitchens and the cleaners of course, could even have been the same as in Medieval times, but in this modern monastery, we have subsumed religion and the liturgical aspects of monastic life to the lore of the doctors.

      The principle, though, is still medieval charity, stretching back to the days when the local Lord would lay aside the wherewithal to treat “Twelve Lepers of Duxenforde” or some such phrase, and around

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