LAST GASP
This article, from 1955, first brought to whose memorial service was last week
BY the time I was in hospital there was no doubt what had happened, and it was already hard for me to move my hands; yet I lay for a while in that queer limbo which one sometimes inhabits at the beginning of an illness, somewhere between physical discomfort and mental ease: life flickers past as comfortably and remotely as an Ealing comedy, but the seats are hard and a man is smoking a herbal mixture in the row behind.
I was even surprised when a pretty, coloured nurse threaded her way through the maze of screens and began to count my breaths with a stop-watch in her hand. Although I told her peevishly that it was Impossible to behave normally while she stood over me like someone sucking a lemon at a flautist, she only went on counting. She was right; unease crept in by degrees, the seats became more cramped, the screen more and more blurred.
It was so blurred that I cannot remember what the iron lung looked like when I first saw it, though I have gone over it since with the kind of threadbare affection one reserves for worn-out loves. It is, in fact, a long box, monstrous and coffin-like, with a bellows attached. One end slides out like the drawer of a filing cabinet, and on this drawer the patient is laid, his head sticking out where the handle would be. The file is closed on him, the bellows make a vacuum inside, and he breathes out as if someone had sat on his chest. Of course, there are minor subtleties and refinements attached: a dial like the ones on the old kind of pressure cooker, a number of glass port- holes, and a Heath Robinson type of electric bell covered with batteries and connected by numberless bare wires to thin air. Not surprisingly, there is always a new model just coming out. I stayed in the old model for six weeks, and it saved my life.
It is not an easy machine for the begin- ner. He breathes whether he likes it or not, and it is some time before he likes it at all. If he works against the rhythm of the thing, he splutters and gasps, and the bellows creak on without paying him the slightest attention. He cannot return the compli- ment because it is as if an asthmatic dormitory were tossing on its rusty springs all round him; there is an ominous click and a deep grunt, followed by a noise like the pulverising of many sardine tins, a pause, and then the whole machine gathers itself together for a final, long-drawn wheeze. Sometimes a porthole is left un- latched, the pressure drops, and the alarm bell peals out, filling the corridor with running feet that are hardly audible above the din.
Yet after a time all this sank from the surface like invisible ink, and I slept. Even the waking world was peopled by dream figures as insubstantial and shimmering as heat haze. Some were known by their sounds even when they could not be seen: the click of the nurses' heels and the almost metallic rustle of starched aprons. Some materialised on silent feet from nowhere at all: the matron in steel-rimmed spectacles and a blue dress, an orderly with white overalls and a blue chin. Some battered all the senses at once: the bustle of the doctor's round, the babble of hushed voices, the ring of faces grouped defer- entially about the great man, the halo of ether.
There was the hospital carpenter who tried to make a contraption to let me read. He was a thin man with a white, lugubrious face and a voice that sighed like a swing- door. He said he disapproved of new- fangled nonsense, taking all his measure- ments ostentatiously with a piece of moul- dy string; but he was apparently not surprised (nor was I), when he came back with a large and complicated bookrest made of orange crates, to find that it wouldn't fit. He was only a little more ruffled when he returned for the fourth time to find that some friends of mine had forestalled him with a functional model in perspex and aluminium. 'That stuff'll look silly in five years' time,' he said.
The room itself came alive — a curious, topsy-turvy, fish's-eye world, over whose banks these creatures peered. The ceiling — a great, white expanse of it — domin- ated everything, like an East Anglian sky, its blues in the gashes of missing plaster, its clouds the cracks by the cornice, and like a child I could see anything in it: a map of the Mediterranean, the Taj Mahal, the profile of a Greek girl with incongruous mutton-chop whiskers. Another piece of plaster hung above my head by a cobweb, a puppet as dead as an autumn leaf until a draught set it dancing Petrushka-like, spin- ning, swinging, jumping ecstatically, sink- ing mournfully, while the lung kept up its accompaniment, comfortable and caco- phonous.
Yet the comfort depended on the cacophony, for while the patient can lie inside the lung like an oyster in its shell, he is safe, and can let worry wash round him like the outgoing tide; once the bellows are turned off and the din hushed, all the discomfort comes rushing in on him again, with the fears that had left him weeks ago behind it, and they find him defenceless. He longs for his lung as much as a tramp might long to get into the police cell out of the rain, and for the same reason: ease and security are worth paying for in self- respect. For it is a battle against his own fears and laziness that he is fighting as much as against his physical weakness. Breath comes to him only in small, hard lumps that have to be shaken down like pills; but he cannot help feeling that he would take them without a murmur if they were sugar, if he were not demoralised, if he were the kind of person he had always wanted to be. Pride demands that he should spend a little longer each day breathing his own air; everything else demands that he think of plausible reasons why he should not. Which would have won on my own battlefield I do not know. Luckily the implacable efficiency of the hospital solved the problem, because pro- tests were useless. In six weeks the din had ceased for good.
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