Low life
Mismatched in hospital
Jeffrey Bernard
Anyway, I asked her point blank, for rea- sons I won't go into here, what the outlook was for somebody who decided to give up dialysis just like that. She said she couldn't be specific about the time, but it would probably be just inside a month that one would slip into the final coma. Apart from the possible horror of breathlessness now an obsession with me — she didn't make it sound quite as bad as an awful lot of unhappy endings. But it's an odd thing in a way that a doctor should specialise in something that is incurable, but then all psychiatrists do just that. And, speaking of insanity, I started chat- ting with a prison officer I met on the land- ing last night who was also out there for a smoke. He told me that he and a colleague are guarding a prisoner aged about 60 who has just had a triple bypass operation. Apparently, he is not muttering about escape — it's all he can do to sit up — but he keeps going on about how much he wants a Cigarette. An operation like that while in prison must be like losing remission. Of course, I asked the warder about wheelchair prisoners and he said that he'd only ever seen two or three, that prisons weren't designed for them and that he thought most criminals in wheelchairs would probably end up in open prisons or secure hospitals. It must be very like it is being here, minus the cigarettes, but the food would almost certainly be a bit better than it is here. Although this warder had nothing to lose in being pleasant to me, he did strike me as being strangely OK for a man who could choose such a shitty job. I wonder, too, why it is that so many girls choose to be nurses. I suspect most of them harbour fantasies about ending up marry- ing handsome doctors but there aren't enough of those to go round.
Eyeing one of the more unpleasant nurs- es in the renal unit yesterday — and they are human beings and not all of them the angels the general public thinks of them as being — it suddenly came to me that we got their creators, Mills & Boon, mixed up with another couple of the same name. The Mills & Boon who invented most of the nurses I know were Freddie Mills, the ex- cruiser-weight champion, and Eric Boon, known in his youth as the Chatteris Thun- derbolt. They used to say here in the orthopaedic ward where they took my leg off that they kept the floors polished just to keep the beds full. The Mills & Boon I'm thinking of would have done it with their bare hands.
And now the nurse that I don't get on too well with, a 'clash of personalities' her friend described our relationship as being, has upset me a little yet again. The other night, after a slight argument, she said to me, 'I don't have to look after you if I don't want to.' Wrong. She obviously hasn't read up on nursing ethics and codes of behaviour. What's more, nurses are sup- posed to be impersonal, which is asking too much, but I suppose a patient has the right to ask for the nurse assigned to him to be changed. I wonder if Hodder & Stoughton managed any nurses or Weidenfeld & Nicolson. We might be more evenly matched.
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