Low life
Banana split
Jeffrey Bernard
After more than 20 years of attending the Middlesex Hospital as an out-patient and in-patient, I have begun to take more notice of the food served up here which isn't just the boring institution-type stuff one becomes used to, it is now a national disgrace. Whoever it is who has the fran- chise to serve us up cold soup at every meal I don't know, but what they're doing is get- ting money for jam and they're not passing much of that on to us, the jam I mean. The only thing here from the food trolley that is warmer than the soup is the ice-cream.
For breakfast we always have a cold hard-boiled egg. It is probably cooked the night before and at the same time the bread must be laid out on the plates in time to allow it to get stale. When I was a lad they cooked the eggs for breakfast in the ward kitchen. They simply shoved 20 or so eggs into a saucepan of boiling water for three minutes and they came up soft and hot.
But it is the standard lunch and supper of what they call cottage pie that we prison- ers all dread. I would like to see just what goes into the brown stuff that lies beneath the reconstituted potatoes that they name so enticingly as being creamed. I have before in England come across food so bad that quite a lot of effort must have gone into its preparation. I mean it just isn't pos- sible to put some things in a saucepan and heat them so that they appear so disgust- ingly as they do here in the Middlesex. The manager of the kitchens should do the decent thing and blow his brains out, hav- ing stipulated in his will that they are not to be served up to a patient.
Neither, like the vast majority of hospi- tals, has the Middlesex got much to be 'I'm beginning to wish you'd go back in again.' proud about when it comes to the control of pain which today should be reasonably suffered by very few indeed; if I have any post-operative pain on Thursday I shall raise the roof. Last week, after my last operation, I was written up for 25-50 mil- ligrams of pethidine in case of pain. And as it happened I suffered quite a lot. When I asked a nurse for some relief, she insisted on giving me only 25 milligrams which is almost an insult when pain is really bad. When I tackled her about it, she said that the doctor may have written the figure 50 but that in her judgment 25 was enough. In her judgment? What a bloody presumption and what a nerve. Who is anybody to judge another human being's pain? Animals don't die in pain in this country, and over the years on the wretched smoking area landings in the Middlesex I have spoken to people dying of cancer and who are in pain. It just shouldn't be allowed. The doc- tors' most well-worn excuse for withholding the stuff is that they fear the patient may become addicted. It is, in fact, not true that people frequently and commonly become addicted to morphine and pethidine, and if it was true so what?
There is good news, though. I have been making enquiries into kidney failure being comparatively new to it and I was cheered up considerably by a nurse in the dialysis unit last week who told me that it is very easy indeed for people with renal failure to commit suicide. This bit of information was further confirmed by another nurse who told me that I could kill myself quite easily by messing about with the diet that forbids us food containing potassium, so I can now end it all with half a dozen bananas and a bar of chocolate, and it occurs to me that a brilliant slightly hippie title for the biogra- phy of a man hell-bent on such a course would be Banana Split. I have never been much of a one for bananas but yesterday I guiltily nibbled my way through a Kit Kat and not long after my blood pressure read 180 over 120. That is a clue if ever you needed one. Citrus fruit is forbidden too so the banana split will have to be washed down by an enormous vodka with crushed ice and the juice of three blood oranges. What fun.
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