WRITING
TWO DAYS IN HOSPITAL
The GP is not happy about the pains in my chest which started yesterday evening —twelve or so hours ago. Get yourself to hospital is his advice and he writes a letter to the MAU at Chichester (MAU, I later discover, is the Medical Assessment Unit). Outside the hospital a huge PVC banner is roped to the wall at first floor level. It announces that the area is a no-smoking zone and this includes ‘. . . in cars in the car park’. I am tempted to light up, a temptation which, on the evidence of the filter tips on the tarmac outside the entrance, others have succumbed to. But I resist and head off enthusiastically to the wrong department, from where I am re-directed. It seems that getting lost, however clear the signs, has become a sort of statutory requirement of visiting, professionally or socially, any NHS hospital and because, unlike hospitals in Venice, these are not converted monasteries or convents, it’s a pretty dull experience. It is 11.30 when I find the MAU.
It is a large ward. Nineteen beds and one amenity room. The beds are arranged in a way which results in few of them facing any of the others. 'New patients report to the nursing station' says the sign and I approach the tables, computer screens and piles of buff files (they remind me of an unusually chaotic solicitor’s office) with a nervousness which I am sure, like lions on the dusty plain, they can detect. I hand them my letter. ‘We’ve been expecting you’ and I am reminded of that false welcome that was always extended to 007 — ‘Ah, Mr Bond. We’ve been expecting you’. And I wonder what I have coming to me. What I have coming to me is bed No.9 which looks directly on to the nursing station and which has behind its head and its switches, its oxygen cylinder and monitors, a high horizontal metal framed window through which the spring sunlight is pouring. I take off my shoes and, otherwise still dressed, I lie on the bed. A staff nurse, care assistant and junior doctor attend to me as if I were important. Attending means blood pressure, pulse (both wrists simultaneously to check that they are pulsing in unison — they are — and four inches of red blood is taken from each arm. The young doctor, who is not wearing a white coat, tells me her name is Abigail and that she is still at medical school. I don’t say ‘Crikey a learner’ but it’s what I am thinking as she inserts a line into my right arm. 'I'm just going to pop a line in'. I can't help thinking that 'pop' is not the most appropriate verb for this procedure.¹ The line is a two inch tube that goes into the vein on the inside of my elbow. It has two screw caps at right angles to each other, one white, one green. Apart from the colour they could be valve caps from the tyre of a bicycle. Later, when no-one is looking I will unscrew them to see what happens. Nothing. Abigail says that the line is to provide me with nourishment should I be unable to eat. I’m not hungry and nervousness leads to ill-considered remarks and I tell her about Abigail Beecher (our history teacher) but as Freddie Cannon’s song must have pre-dated her birth by about 25 years she hasn’t a clue what I am on about. ‘Come back later’, I say ‘come back later’ and I think about uniforms.
I am sorry Abigail isn’t wearing a white coat. Without one she seems to me to be somehow not professional (though not unprofessional). None of the doctors here wears a coat of any sort and the uniforms adopted by the nurses are not what nurses’ uniforms once were, or should be. I am not thinking here of the obvious Carry On nurse but there is no doubt that the starched apron and crisp white cap speak of confidence and trust. Of cleanliness and discipline. Their absence and the practicalities they represent has, we all know now, corresponded with the growth of what the media insists on calling superbugs. The nurses’ uniforms here are blue tunic and trousers or the more traditional blue dress with black stockings (tights) but no apron or cap.
It is lunch time and one of the care assistants (care assistants wear pink) brings some sandwiches and a yoghurt. I am not hungry. I think again about uniforms and I am coming to realise that there is a sort of system in disguise here: the male junior doctors could be young executives on Wall Street in a film from the nineteen seventies. Their boss will be Michael Douglas. They are all anticipating big bonuses yet they know this may not happen and they relieve the stress by joking with each other in a rugby club sort of way. Their ties are loose, their shirt sleeves rolled halfway to the elbows. Their female counterparts (there seem to be about four of each sex although they come and go and look so similar I can’t be sure) wear trousers in various shades of pale brown and which all hang a bit too low on the hips. They have thin white blouses and carry small leather shoulder bags with long straps. These are slung from the left shoulder to the right hip. There is something inherently inelegant and un-sexy about this way of carrying a bag although it is surely more practical than carrying one whose strap does not cross the body. The air hostess, in the golden days before ‘air stewardess’, would always carry her bag in the more elegant way.
The registrar here is, however, elegant and she does not carry a shoulder bag, although if she did you know it would hang vertically. She wears high chunky heels, a knee-length tweed skirt and a close fitting white blouse. Her tights are wrinkled slightly at the ankles and give the impression that they are made of silk which they almost certainly are not. A cluster of swinging identity cards and telephones is attached to her hip. It is hard to know if these items constitute a uniform as she is the only representative of her caste here, but I suspect they may do. She is of far Eastern origin and her hair is long and dark and thick and tied tightly back with a black ribbon. It falls to the middle of her back. Sitting on my bed, a file of my notes on her lap, she could be reading the news on a South Korean television station. Later, as she walks past the foot of my bed, the earpiece of the stethoscope around her neck bobs tantalisingly against her breast. Unfortunately, she spoils all these paradigms of elegance by yawning like a gibbon.
Mid afternoon. I am told by someone I haven’t seen before that I have to go to have a chest x-ray and a porter appears with a chair on wheels. It’s not a wheel-chair as all four wheels are small, no more than casters really. The journey takes me along hollow empty corridors and other bright corridors past beds which seem to have been abandoned with their patients still in them. I realise that the reason I am not in a proper wheel-chair is because if I were I would be able to drive the thing away if I too were to be abandoned in a corridor. This chair with wheels is undriveable. But I am not abandoned.
At about five o’clock I am returned to my bed which already is beginning to feel a bit like home. My arms are sore from the needles (why do they need so much of my blood?) and I consider where I am. The design of this place is not conducive to restfulness or peace. There are bright neon lights behind angry and busy reflectors. There are flickering computer screens and constant pingings, buzzings and alarms (to which no-one responds) from the many monitors including the one I am connected to by three wires. It tells me that my heart rate is in the mid to high forties. This means nothing to me but apparently it is unusually low and is something I should be pleased about. So I decide to be pleased and I find I am developing a cavalier attitude to my cables and electrodes and I disconnect them to get a beaker of cold water from the dispenser (for staff only) at the other side of the ward. My monitor doesn’t like being separated from me and bleeps loudly as if it were a duckling pulled by the current from its mother. No-one seems to notice. Back in my bed I re-connect my cables and the duckling is re-united with the duck. I wait to be reprimanded but no-one comes. They are all more interested in Olive.
Olive lies in bed No.12 or 13. Her curtains are permanently closed. A woman with long blonde hair as straight as a waterfall parts the curtains and leaves the ward. She looks to the floor as she passes. A daughter, I suppose. Dinner. I get the feeling that dinner is less to do with nourishment and more to do with occupational therapy. They don’t want us to become bored and to dwell on our illnesses. Or, in my case, the illness I don’t appear to have. They keep taking blood and each time the blood tells them nothing.
The least exciting of the dishes on offer is chicken salad and I feel I want nothing more adventurous than my illicit walk to the cool water. Besides, I’m not hungry. The lettuce is crisp and fresh but without dressing; there are sliced tomatoes, sliced cucumber, some grated carrot and slices of chicken. It is bland, innocuous but surprisingly not unpleasant. The rice pudding, though, is utterly ghastly. For one thing, it is not rice pudding. I know this for a fact. I’ve seen this stuff before. It comes in a yellow and blue packet from the ironmonger, it’s sold under the trade name of Polycell and you mix it with water and use it to glue wallpaper to your walls. It glues my tongue to the roof of my mouth and seems to congeal in my throat. On the plus side it tastes of nothing. Absolutely nothing. But I eat it so as not to hurt anyone’s feelings. The two cream crackers and piece of warm edam cheese which are each wrapped in transparent plastic are airline food but edible. After swallowing all this I disconnect the ducklings to help myself to more of the cool water: the Polycell needs to be thinned. Again I stroll innocently past the nursing station and again I am ignored. This is beginning to disappoint me and somehow I long to be challenged — it would at least make me feel less unimportant.
I return to my bed, plug myself in again and watch the junior doctors moving about at the nursing station. Their local journeys are made while sitting on their swivel chairs which each rise from a five-legged spider on casters. They push themselves backwards with their feet on the floor or go sideways or forwards by gripping the edge of the table and tugging it. This, of course, requires a well-anchored table. Longer journeys are made on foot and are never hurried.
Next to me is a gent in the amenity room. It’s all glass so he gets no privacy. I watch him imperiously reading his book, his bed seeming somehow higher than mine. I suppose he can’t hear all these bleeps and monitors but I prefer the democracy of the open ward — the levelling of it all. I think of how George Orwell might have agreed with me and then remember that he spent many of his last days in a private sanatorium high in the Cotswolds. And had death not claimed him too soon he would have ended those days even higher and even more privately in a sanatorium in Switzerland. There must always be a conflicting dialogue between pain and ideals I suppose.
And the man in the amenity room can’t hear the doctor at bed No.12 or 13 saying ‘She’s trying to die. Blood pressure’s falling all the time.’
I think about the unusual phrase. The idea of someone trying to die speaks of something positive. An attempt by someone so weak as, perhaps, to lack the strength even to be conscious. Yet the doctor is affording her this quality of remaining in control of her body and her life and I admire him for this. Is it better for the gent in the amenity room to be immune from this? Is it better that I am not?
‘It’s still falling’.
There is no panic, no raising of voices, just a dignified commentary. Matter of fact almost. This is not TV.
The staff nurse makes a phone call.
It’s an answering machine.
I sleep, but not before they help themselves to some more of my blood. At 2.15 I awake to the sound of my curtains being closed. Then comes the foreboding and threatening sound of the heavy black sheet which covers the mortuary trolley being drawn aside. Then all quiet until, like a tiny thunder, it is replaced. Then my curtains are drawn back. And we’re all as we were before. More or less.
More or less.
At seven o’clock the following morning another tube of blood (it looks very dark) is taken from my left arm by a large woman in a white coat. Who is she? Perhaps she’s someone with an obsessive and morbid liking for blood who has walked in off the street. Why don’t I ask her? Why should I trust?
The junior doctors ignore the large woman in a white coat. They are busy leaning over a computer screen showing a bluish black and white picture of a rib cage. Are these my ribs? I wonder, but the appearance of breakfast takes away these questions and I concentrate on my cereal (bran flakes), yoghurt, toast and marmalade and cool coffee.
The consultant is making his rounds. He is not James Robertson Justice’s Lancelot Spratt but still he commands an authority which is defined by the small flock (Christ and the disciples) which follows him. The flock itself is led by the South Korean newsreader, then some junior doctors and, at the back, a handful of students. Another example of uniform is revealed. The consultant, like the junior doctors, does not wear a jacket but his shirt sleeves are rolled down and are fastened with golden cufflinks. His tie is tied tightly, his trousers are darker than those of the juniors and his shoes are shining black leather, not brown suede. He talks to the newsreader about me as if I am not there and then to me as if the disciples are not there. It seems all the tests have been negative so they are going to take one more tube of blood and take me to the treadmill. He says this as if it is the final attempt to finish me off and I hope this is just my misinterpretation of a consultant’s intonation. At this point neither I nor he knows that it will be the expensive machinery which appears to suffer more than I.
The treadmill is in Cardiology and is at the end of another journey on the chair with wheels. Before introducing me to the machinery, one of the two women, who tells me she enjoys a good rock and roll concert, takes my blood pressure. I try to make a little joke about being surprised that there is any left from which to get a reading but it fails. She talks of Neil Diamond and I realise that her definition of rock and roll and mine couldn’t be much further apart. ‘Perfect blood pressure’ she says. Her friend says nothing, but I think I see disappointment in her eyes at this news. She orders me to remove my dressing gown and pyjama top and shaves my chest with bravado and enthusiasm. I begin to form the impression that she doesn’t like men and I’m glad I’m not pimply. Then a dozen or so electrodes with wires like untidy knitting are attached to the bare patches and I am ordered on to the treadmill. I will have seen one of these in the gym, the Neil Diamond fan tells me but as I have never been inside a gym since leaving school she explains its action. I am not really listening but musing on the fact that as well as never having been in a gym I have also never been into a McDonalds, and that, probably if you haven’t been into the one you don’t need to go into the other.
The treadmill starts. It is a black rubber band about a couple of feet broad which is stretched between two rollers about six feet apart. There are side rails to stop you falling off and one at the front that you hang on to, to prevent yourself being swept away. At first there seems to be no danger of this for this is no more than a gentle stroll. Had I been listening more attentively to the explanation I would have known that not only would the thing gather speed but that it would gradually incline to about 30 degrees so that after ten minutes I am effectively running uphill. They are trying to get my heart rate up to 160 (four times my normal resting rate) but it just won’t go that high. The machine is running at maximum, I am sweating like a foundry worker, the belt is getting slippery and my pyjama trousers are sticking to my thighs with the sweat. From time to time I have to make a grab at the waist band for fear less of revealing myself to the Neil Diamond fan and the man-hater and more of falling headlong with the pyjamas knotted around my knees and a tangle of wires around my neck.
My heart rate is up to 148 and I think I can smell burning rubber. The two women decide in unison that I have done enough and the thing returns to the level, slows down, stops and the smell of burning rubber subsides. I lie on the bed with the electrodes still attached, my blood pressure is re-taken (not surprisingly it is high) but it and my heart rate soon revert to normal. The Neil Diamond fan congratulates me on having the heart of a man twenty years younger but her colleague still seems a little disappointed that she didn’t break me. Again I feel like 007, this time at the end of the film.
I return to the ward on the chair with wheels (I’m still not allowed to walk). Back at bed No. 9 I don’t re-connect my monitor and as no-one seems interested in me any more I close the curtains and put my clothes on. Eventually a young doctor comes to tell me that they have no idea what caused the pain and that I can go. They need the bed.
It has been only a couple of days but it doesn’t take long to form relationships when one has nothing to hide. The last intimate moment is when the nurse removes the line and its dressing from my arm. It is like the end of an affair and we will each go in our own direction, possibly never to meet again. Do they feel this? I suppose not. To them I am just another patient. Just another customer. They are, of course, trained to care and forget in equal measure. To love and abandon in equal measure, without which qualities they could not perform efficiently. I cannot do this.
On the way out we say goodbye to the kind and overweight care assistant and young Dr. Abigail. Somehow I don’t want to leave, yet at the same time I can’t wait to get out into the sunshine, and to see how the garden is at home.
1. Procedure. It's all procedures in the NHS. They love the word. Now that the operating theatre is no longer a theatre with tiered seating for students, journalists and assorted voyeuristic riff-raff and now that operations are procedures, it cannot be long before some NHS Trust Manager eager to give credence to his (probably unnecessary) job re-names it. As what? Procedural centre? Or to align it with Cardiology, Radiology and the rest, what about Procedology? I can believe it.
The GP is not happy about the pains in my chest which started yesterday evening —twelve or so hours ago. Get yourself to hospital is his advice and he writes a letter to the MAU at Chichester (MAU, I later discover, is the Medical Assessment Unit). Outside the hospital a huge PVC banner is roped to the wall at first floor level. It announces that the area is a no-smoking zone and this includes ‘. . . in cars in the car park’. I am tempted to light up, a temptation which, on the evidence of the filter tips on the tarmac outside the entrance, others have succumbed to. But I resist and head off enthusiastically to the wrong department, from where I am re-directed. It seems that getting lost, however clear the signs, has become a sort of statutory requirement of visiting, professionally or socially, any NHS hospital and because, unlike hospitals in Venice, these are not converted monasteries or convents, it’s a pretty dull experience. It is 11.30 when I find the MAU.
It is a large ward. Nineteen beds and one amenity room. The beds are arranged in a way which results in few of them facing any of the others. 'New patients report to the nursing station' says the sign and I approach the tables, computer screens and piles of buff files (they remind me of an unusually chaotic solicitor’s office) with a nervousness which I am sure, like lions on the dusty plain, they can detect. I hand them my letter. ‘We’ve been expecting you’ and I am reminded of that false welcome that was always extended to 007 — ‘Ah, Mr Bond. We’ve been expecting you’. And I wonder what I have coming to me. What I have coming to me is bed No.9 which looks directly on to the nursing station and which has behind its head and its switches, its oxygen cylinder and monitors, a high horizontal metal framed window through which the spring sunlight is pouring. I take off my shoes and, otherwise still dressed, I lie on the bed. A staff nurse, care assistant and junior doctor attend to me as if I were important. Attending means blood pressure, pulse (both wrists simultaneously to check that they are pulsing in unison — they are — and four inches of red blood is taken from each arm. The young doctor, who is not wearing a white coat, tells me her name is Abigail and that she is still at medical school. I don’t say ‘Crikey a learner’ but it’s what I am thinking as she inserts a line into my right arm. 'I'm just going to pop a line in'. I can't help thinking that 'pop' is not the most appropriate verb for this procedure.¹ The line is a two inch tube that goes into the vein on the inside of my elbow. It has two screw caps at right angles to each other, one white, one green. Apart from the colour they could be valve caps from the tyre of a bicycle. Later, when no-one is looking I will unscrew them to see what happens. Nothing. Abigail says that the line is to provide me with nourishment should I be unable to eat. I’m not hungry and nervousness leads to ill-considered remarks and I tell her about Abigail Beecher (our history teacher) but as Freddie Cannon’s song must have pre-dated her birth by about 25 years she hasn’t a clue what I am on about. ‘Come back later’, I say ‘come back later’ and I think about uniforms.
I am sorry Abigail isn’t wearing a white coat. Without one she seems to me to be somehow not professional (though not unprofessional). None of the doctors here wears a coat of any sort and the uniforms adopted by the nurses are not what nurses’ uniforms once were, or should be. I am not thinking here of the obvious Carry On nurse but there is no doubt that the starched apron and crisp white cap speak of confidence and trust. Of cleanliness and discipline. Their absence and the practicalities they represent has, we all know now, corresponded with the growth of what the media insists on calling superbugs. The nurses’ uniforms here are blue tunic and trousers or the more traditional blue dress with black stockings (tights) but no apron or cap.
It is lunch time and one of the care assistants (care assistants wear pink) brings some sandwiches and a yoghurt. I am not hungry. I think again about uniforms and I am coming to realise that there is a sort of system in disguise here: the male junior doctors could be young executives on Wall Street in a film from the nineteen seventies. Their boss will be Michael Douglas. They are all anticipating big bonuses yet they know this may not happen and they relieve the stress by joking with each other in a rugby club sort of way. Their ties are loose, their shirt sleeves rolled halfway to the elbows. Their female counterparts (there seem to be about four of each sex although they come and go and look so similar I can’t be sure) wear trousers in various shades of pale brown and which all hang a bit too low on the hips. They have thin white blouses and carry small leather shoulder bags with long straps. These are slung from the left shoulder to the right hip. There is something inherently inelegant and un-sexy about this way of carrying a bag although it is surely more practical than carrying one whose strap does not cross the body. The air hostess, in the golden days before ‘air stewardess’, would always carry her bag in the more elegant way.
The registrar here is, however, elegant and she does not carry a shoulder bag, although if she did you know it would hang vertically. She wears high chunky heels, a knee-length tweed skirt and a close fitting white blouse. Her tights are wrinkled slightly at the ankles and give the impression that they are made of silk which they almost certainly are not. A cluster of swinging identity cards and telephones is attached to her hip. It is hard to know if these items constitute a uniform as she is the only representative of her caste here, but I suspect they may do. She is of far Eastern origin and her hair is long and dark and thick and tied tightly back with a black ribbon. It falls to the middle of her back. Sitting on my bed, a file of my notes on her lap, she could be reading the news on a South Korean television station. Later, as she walks past the foot of my bed, the earpiece of the stethoscope around her neck bobs tantalisingly against her breast. Unfortunately, she spoils all these paradigms of elegance by yawning like a gibbon.
Mid afternoon. I am told by someone I haven’t seen before that I have to go to have a chest x-ray and a porter appears with a chair on wheels. It’s not a wheel-chair as all four wheels are small, no more than casters really. The journey takes me along hollow empty corridors and other bright corridors past beds which seem to have been abandoned with their patients still in them. I realise that the reason I am not in a proper wheel-chair is because if I were I would be able to drive the thing away if I too were to be abandoned in a corridor. This chair with wheels is undriveable. But I am not abandoned.
At about five o’clock I am returned to my bed which already is beginning to feel a bit like home. My arms are sore from the needles (why do they need so much of my blood?) and I consider where I am. The design of this place is not conducive to restfulness or peace. There are bright neon lights behind angry and busy reflectors. There are flickering computer screens and constant pingings, buzzings and alarms (to which no-one responds) from the many monitors including the one I am connected to by three wires. It tells me that my heart rate is in the mid to high forties. This means nothing to me but apparently it is unusually low and is something I should be pleased about. So I decide to be pleased and I find I am developing a cavalier attitude to my cables and electrodes and I disconnect them to get a beaker of cold water from the dispenser (for staff only) at the other side of the ward. My monitor doesn’t like being separated from me and bleeps loudly as if it were a duckling pulled by the current from its mother. No-one seems to notice. Back in my bed I re-connect my cables and the duckling is re-united with the duck. I wait to be reprimanded but no-one comes. They are all more interested in Olive.
Olive lies in bed No.12 or 13. Her curtains are permanently closed. A woman with long blonde hair as straight as a waterfall parts the curtains and leaves the ward. She looks to the floor as she passes. A daughter, I suppose. Dinner. I get the feeling that dinner is less to do with nourishment and more to do with occupational therapy. They don’t want us to become bored and to dwell on our illnesses. Or, in my case, the illness I don’t appear to have. They keep taking blood and each time the blood tells them nothing.
The least exciting of the dishes on offer is chicken salad and I feel I want nothing more adventurous than my illicit walk to the cool water. Besides, I’m not hungry. The lettuce is crisp and fresh but without dressing; there are sliced tomatoes, sliced cucumber, some grated carrot and slices of chicken. It is bland, innocuous but surprisingly not unpleasant. The rice pudding, though, is utterly ghastly. For one thing, it is not rice pudding. I know this for a fact. I’ve seen this stuff before. It comes in a yellow and blue packet from the ironmonger, it’s sold under the trade name of Polycell and you mix it with water and use it to glue wallpaper to your walls. It glues my tongue to the roof of my mouth and seems to congeal in my throat. On the plus side it tastes of nothing. Absolutely nothing. But I eat it so as not to hurt anyone’s feelings. The two cream crackers and piece of warm edam cheese which are each wrapped in transparent plastic are airline food but edible. After swallowing all this I disconnect the ducklings to help myself to more of the cool water: the Polycell needs to be thinned. Again I stroll innocently past the nursing station and again I am ignored. This is beginning to disappoint me and somehow I long to be challenged — it would at least make me feel less unimportant.
I return to my bed, plug myself in again and watch the junior doctors moving about at the nursing station. Their local journeys are made while sitting on their swivel chairs which each rise from a five-legged spider on casters. They push themselves backwards with their feet on the floor or go sideways or forwards by gripping the edge of the table and tugging it. This, of course, requires a well-anchored table. Longer journeys are made on foot and are never hurried.
Next to me is a gent in the amenity room. It’s all glass so he gets no privacy. I watch him imperiously reading his book, his bed seeming somehow higher than mine. I suppose he can’t hear all these bleeps and monitors but I prefer the democracy of the open ward — the levelling of it all. I think of how George Orwell might have agreed with me and then remember that he spent many of his last days in a private sanatorium high in the Cotswolds. And had death not claimed him too soon he would have ended those days even higher and even more privately in a sanatorium in Switzerland. There must always be a conflicting dialogue between pain and ideals I suppose.
And the man in the amenity room can’t hear the doctor at bed No.12 or 13 saying ‘She’s trying to die. Blood pressure’s falling all the time.’
I think about the unusual phrase. The idea of someone trying to die speaks of something positive. An attempt by someone so weak as, perhaps, to lack the strength even to be conscious. Yet the doctor is affording her this quality of remaining in control of her body and her life and I admire him for this. Is it better for the gent in the amenity room to be immune from this? Is it better that I am not?
‘It’s still falling’.
There is no panic, no raising of voices, just a dignified commentary. Matter of fact almost. This is not TV.
The staff nurse makes a phone call.
It’s an answering machine.
I sleep, but not before they help themselves to some more of my blood. At 2.15 I awake to the sound of my curtains being closed. Then comes the foreboding and threatening sound of the heavy black sheet which covers the mortuary trolley being drawn aside. Then all quiet until, like a tiny thunder, it is replaced. Then my curtains are drawn back. And we’re all as we were before. More or less.
More or less.
At seven o’clock the following morning another tube of blood (it looks very dark) is taken from my left arm by a large woman in a white coat. Who is she? Perhaps she’s someone with an obsessive and morbid liking for blood who has walked in off the street. Why don’t I ask her? Why should I trust?
The junior doctors ignore the large woman in a white coat. They are busy leaning over a computer screen showing a bluish black and white picture of a rib cage. Are these my ribs? I wonder, but the appearance of breakfast takes away these questions and I concentrate on my cereal (bran flakes), yoghurt, toast and marmalade and cool coffee.
The consultant is making his rounds. He is not James Robertson Justice’s Lancelot Spratt but still he commands an authority which is defined by the small flock (Christ and the disciples) which follows him. The flock itself is led by the South Korean newsreader, then some junior doctors and, at the back, a handful of students. Another example of uniform is revealed. The consultant, like the junior doctors, does not wear a jacket but his shirt sleeves are rolled down and are fastened with golden cufflinks. His tie is tied tightly, his trousers are darker than those of the juniors and his shoes are shining black leather, not brown suede. He talks to the newsreader about me as if I am not there and then to me as if the disciples are not there. It seems all the tests have been negative so they are going to take one more tube of blood and take me to the treadmill. He says this as if it is the final attempt to finish me off and I hope this is just my misinterpretation of a consultant’s intonation. At this point neither I nor he knows that it will be the expensive machinery which appears to suffer more than I.
The treadmill is in Cardiology and is at the end of another journey on the chair with wheels. Before introducing me to the machinery, one of the two women, who tells me she enjoys a good rock and roll concert, takes my blood pressure. I try to make a little joke about being surprised that there is any left from which to get a reading but it fails. She talks of Neil Diamond and I realise that her definition of rock and roll and mine couldn’t be much further apart. ‘Perfect blood pressure’ she says. Her friend says nothing, but I think I see disappointment in her eyes at this news. She orders me to remove my dressing gown and pyjama top and shaves my chest with bravado and enthusiasm. I begin to form the impression that she doesn’t like men and I’m glad I’m not pimply. Then a dozen or so electrodes with wires like untidy knitting are attached to the bare patches and I am ordered on to the treadmill. I will have seen one of these in the gym, the Neil Diamond fan tells me but as I have never been inside a gym since leaving school she explains its action. I am not really listening but musing on the fact that as well as never having been in a gym I have also never been into a McDonalds, and that, probably if you haven’t been into the one you don’t need to go into the other.
The treadmill starts. It is a black rubber band about a couple of feet broad which is stretched between two rollers about six feet apart. There are side rails to stop you falling off and one at the front that you hang on to, to prevent yourself being swept away. At first there seems to be no danger of this for this is no more than a gentle stroll. Had I been listening more attentively to the explanation I would have known that not only would the thing gather speed but that it would gradually incline to about 30 degrees so that after ten minutes I am effectively running uphill. They are trying to get my heart rate up to 160 (four times my normal resting rate) but it just won’t go that high. The machine is running at maximum, I am sweating like a foundry worker, the belt is getting slippery and my pyjama trousers are sticking to my thighs with the sweat. From time to time I have to make a grab at the waist band for fear less of revealing myself to the Neil Diamond fan and the man-hater and more of falling headlong with the pyjamas knotted around my knees and a tangle of wires around my neck.
My heart rate is up to 148 and I think I can smell burning rubber. The two women decide in unison that I have done enough and the thing returns to the level, slows down, stops and the smell of burning rubber subsides. I lie on the bed with the electrodes still attached, my blood pressure is re-taken (not surprisingly it is high) but it and my heart rate soon revert to normal. The Neil Diamond fan congratulates me on having the heart of a man twenty years younger but her colleague still seems a little disappointed that she didn’t break me. Again I feel like 007, this time at the end of the film.
I return to the ward on the chair with wheels (I’m still not allowed to walk). Back at bed No. 9 I don’t re-connect my monitor and as no-one seems interested in me any more I close the curtains and put my clothes on. Eventually a young doctor comes to tell me that they have no idea what caused the pain and that I can go. They need the bed.
It has been only a couple of days but it doesn’t take long to form relationships when one has nothing to hide. The last intimate moment is when the nurse removes the line and its dressing from my arm. It is like the end of an affair and we will each go in our own direction, possibly never to meet again. Do they feel this? I suppose not. To them I am just another patient. Just another customer. They are, of course, trained to care and forget in equal measure. To love and abandon in equal measure, without which qualities they could not perform efficiently. I cannot do this.
On the way out we say goodbye to the kind and overweight care assistant and young Dr. Abigail. Somehow I don’t want to leave, yet at the same time I can’t wait to get out into the sunshine, and to see how the garden is at home.
1. Procedure. It's all procedures in the NHS. They love the word. Now that the operating theatre is no longer a theatre with tiered seating for students, journalists and assorted voyeuristic riff-raff and now that operations are procedures, it cannot be long before some NHS Trust Manager eager to give credence to his (probably unnecessary) job re-names it. As what? Procedural centre? Or to align it with Cardiology, Radiology and the rest, what about Procedology? I can believe it.
