Low life
Smoke alarm
Jeffrey Bernard
Ithink I may have been thrown back into life a little prematurely this week because yesterday morning I was under a general anaesthetic, but I was home in time for tea in the afternoon. It looks as though the specialist kidney ward, St Philip's, is going to become my second home and there, yet again, I woke up to be faced by the Cambo- dian nurse with the fixed grin of efficiency who I referred to in this column a couple of weeks ago as being Pol Pot. I must also change the name of the ward from St
Philip's to the Killing Fields.
I am beginning to find that there is a slightly depressing brotherhood of renal failures who are all slowly deteriorating although they will keep singing a ghastly sort of chorus the words of which imply that things could be much worse. I don't quite see how they could be since from what little I've heard kidney transplants are not the magic that sentimental tabloids or heroic little television documentaries make them out to be, and it seems to me that what little cheeriness I hear is largely a matter of whistling out of tune in the dark.
I had another two blood transfusions to help build up my strength and from now on I shall have to give myself two injections a week of a drug which builds up one's haemoglobin. I am told that some years ago participants in that gruelling cycle marathon, the Tour de France, took to using this stuff only to find that it thick- ened up their blood to such an extent that it had difficulty in circulating and that therefore the indulgent cyclists were falling off their bikes dead like flies.
The other nurse I mentioned a couple of weeks ago with the appalling halitosis has still not got rid of it, and I suppose she never will have any reason to get rid of it so long as she remains so deeply unattractive. I mean why bother if nobody is going to come near you anyway? It may be my imag- ination but I think Pol Pot smells, if any- thing, of embalming fluid.
Until this last visit I was grateful to be free of the usual domestic helpers in and out of the ward pantries behaving like so many marionettes. But we have a new one in the Killing Fields — a dumpy foreigner whom I call Generalissimo Franco. Why, I wonder, doesn't the goodness and com- monsense filter down from the consultants and their registrars to the band of little monsters who work for them and the hos- pital service in one way or another? I sup- pose nursing is no longer a vocation since the demise of Mills and Boon. It never was in America, and in most European coun- tries nursing has usually been the occupa- tion of the friendless and childless woman who knows how to crack the whip.
And speaking of cracking the whip I shall have arrived in Morocco by the time you read this and what's more I will have flown to Marrakesh on an aeroplane on which smoking is permitted. I shall return on a smoker as well. I can last for three or four hours without a cigarette, but that is hardly the point and has little to do with my objec- tion to being told what I can and what I can't do. I mention it because just before I left the Middlesex Hospital in a trance there was an ugly rumour circulating that the busi- ness of making all hospitals no smoking areas — even cutting it out on the landings — might just about become a reality.
Any more liberties taken away and this place will become dangerously like living in Nazi Germany. Anyway, would it work? We know what the reaction of a young man
would be today were a sergeant major to scream an order at him, and I think that the vast majority of smokers would greet prohibition in the same way, namely to utter the word 'bollocks'. I have very seri- ously considered my own reaction to such a draconian anti-smoking lobby, and I am sure I would only go into a hospital in the event unconscious and in an ambulance and, in the event of the necessity for pain relief, recourse to the bottle would have to suffice. That is how strongly I feel about being just told that I mustn't smoke.
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