Some people love it. I met a woman this weekend who makes a hobby of hospital visits. She sits with people who have cancer and, "makes sure they've filled all their forms in properly." I admired her dedication and sacrifice of her precious days off (she was a DCI by day) but her brusque efficiency made me secretly hope never to need her services.
I prefer to avoid hospitals, as they are full of sick and tired people (and that's just the staff) but when someone you love is there you have a duty to visit.
Some families sit by the bed for the full 8 hour visiting session, barely talking, watching the machines go 'beep', fluffing pillows and undertaking any nursing duties that the staff are too stretched or tired to do. Others keep their visits short and sweet, exchanging information about each other's life since the last visit and leaving with a breezy, "cheerio," and a peck on the cheek. Some families bring small children to fold their grandparents up inside the bed by accidentally pressing a few buttons and asking questions about death with saucer-wide eyes. The dementia patients families explain to their loved ones with increasing volume that they are in, "hospital. Yes, hospital. HOSPITAL! H O S , oh never mind." These are extremely useful visitors, as the staff generally prefer to ignore the rantings of the senile. Some families arrive with sweets and fruit and leave before they have eaten all of it. These families are particularly useful, as hospital food is still mostly inedible.
I'm the type of visitor that engages in salt smuggling to a cardiac ward, sits watching the people and listens to the noises. Hospitals wouldn't be my first choice of place for creative stimulus but they are, nevertheless, a rich source of inspiration. They are full of humour, which I find useful to share with the person I am visiting.
I listened to the man with the rare blood disorder tell the nurse that he caught it when he was in the Boer war and heard her ask him if he got any medals.
The man in the next door bed who shouted, "There's an ambulance!" every time one went passed the window before his daughter replied, "Yes Dad, you're in hospital," was tragically funny. If I'm ever in hospital I hope the staff aren't too busy to come and deal with the redundant , unconscious woman that is in my hospital bed. He tried talking to her himself but she just wasn't shifting. I dread to think what kind of night he will have if he has to share his bed with her. I couldn't see her at first but by the end of my visit I was as certain of her presence as he was.
The food arrived. Patients cleared their trays of sweets, crisps and fruit and apologised to the girl bringing them their dinner.
"I'm sorry. It's just that when you have visitors they bring you sweets and things."
"What's wrong with that?" The girl puzzled.
"Well it means that I probably won't eat my dinner."
The girl raised an eyebrow and a small smile began to twitch at the corner of her mouth. She surveyed the pushed away treats,"It's all good stuff though."
"Are you saying this dinner isn't?"
She chuckled, thinking that she would rather chew her own arm off than be forced to eat it herself.
The man opposite pushed his food around his plate a bit and the nurse who came to give him his drugs and stick a thermometer in his ear (which she does without a word of warning) asked him why he wasn't eating his dinner. He complained of feeling sick and the nurse told him that he needs white toast and jam, "That's what my mum always gave me when I was sick. The plainness of the toast and the stickiness of the jam helps to keep it all in," she says cheerfully. In the absence of jam to stick the potential vomit in place she brings him a bowl. He begs for her to remove his plate of food but as that is not her job she continues rambling on about ginger and bananas." She is nice. I liked her. We gave him a banana.
We played a game of 'best word to describe the food'.
"Un-eatable."
"Unpalatable."
"Rancid."
"Revolting, nauseating, abhorrent."
"Distasteful, stomach-churning, vile.
"Indelible, indigestible, inedible."
"Crap?"
The nurse returned to the man with the banana, "You still feeling crap?" she asked him before moving his tray of food to the bedside cabinet.
"See? crap! It's a technical term for the food."
I hadn't noticed the man's prosthetic leg until the nurse accidentally kicked it.
"I noticed it straight away when I came in. It was propped up against the end of the bed," said my Dad, really beginning to enjoy the humour of a hospital.
Things started to get quiet. The man with the leg had eaten his banana and fallen asleep in the chair, the man in the next bed's visitors had left and he was quietly chuntering away to the invisible unconscious woman in his bed. The man with the blood disorder had been plugged into his heating bag, temperature set to 40 degrees and drifted off to, what I can only imagine, were tropical dreams. We had caught up on all the news and so we sat and listened to the noises of the ward.
The not so gentle hum of the heating bag, the slide of shoes across the floor, the different beeps of the various machines and the echo of those beeps, as bored patients incorrectly sing back the tune.
"It was bothering me all night. Are they triplets?"
"No, I think it's semi quavers followed by a rest."
"He sang three."
"I know but he was wrong. There are four."
"You should hear the plasma drip. That has a brilliant tune."
"What note is it?"
"I guess an Eb."
"I think it's a F."
We checked. You never know when you might need the digital tuner on your phone.
"It's a B. A slightly flat B. Not a Bb but just a tiny bit out of tune."
"Well, who'd have thought it. I thought it was much lower than that."
Two machines begin to beep and there is a harmonic buzz between them. We wonder if you would experience the Doppler effect if you walked between them.
"There's a symphony in here," we agreed and I left with a notebook of ideas promising not to write it first. Everyone needs a project for when they leave hospital, even if the days of 40 mile walks and mountain climbing are over.
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