Low life
Teaboy
Jeff-reY Bernard illiUsPital yet again. I'm beginning to feel Ike someone Egon Ronay has sent out on a 'outing mission. Last year the Royal Free – aF,nd to think I started at St Stephens in the uthant Road in 1965! Anyway, here we are at the Middlesex and I think I'll award it three crossed scalpels. (St Stephens only got aLeorn plaster, by the way.) The worst thing ttLuat ean be said about this place is that it's i tUe most boring hospital I've ever been n– Irne dragging by as happens, I imagine, in Prison. Compensations are a caring medical Staff less inclined to play God than in most 41aees, a sort of jolly-hockey-sticks nursing 't'aff not obsessed with old-fashioned probeet)l and best of all, the most extraordinary unch of patients I've come across. Jake last night for example. In my 01.endly role as tea trolley driver and hot rinks dispenser at night I spoke to a new Patient who I'd heard suffered badly from ,, s"s.unthia. 'I hear you've got insomnia,' I 111,c1. 'Don't worry, I can't sleep either and it t make you some tea whenever you want r In Plied. the middle of the night."Oh no,' he '1 haven't got insomnia at all., "ell, what have you got?' I asked. 'I don't
know,' he said. 'I can't remember.' Must be amnesia,' I said facetiously. 'Yes, that's right. Amnesia. Yes, that's what I've got,' he said, 'amnesia.'
What others? Well, there are four of us who've fallen foul of the dreaded pancreas, two strokes, one simple case of decaying senility, a bleeding ulcer, a businessman suffering from financial failure – at least that's my diagnosis – a heart murmur and a quite revolting man who tells me that he can't retain salt. When I told him, in an attempt to console him, that at least it wasn't as serious as my own complaint, an inability to retain cash, he quite flew off the handle.
When we are not lying flat on our backs and being addressed in that loud sing-song voice used by doctors on the assumption that they are addressing half-wits, we gather in what's called the 'day room'. This is a dreadful fuggy little room in which we're permitted to smoke. This morning, Mr Stanhope of Chislehurst enquired kindly after my latest urine test.
'Yes, we had a cousin died of diabetes in 1956. No, wait a minute, she had her first coma in 1956 but she didn't actually die until 1957. August '57. It must have been August because I was staying with my son in Portsmouth in July and I know I got back just before she died. Of course, we never knew she had it, neither did she. Then in September of 1956 she keeled over and then again in – I think it must have been
October – anyway, it was either October or November– she lived near Guildford by the way – she had another coma. The one in August the following year, that would have been 1957, she never came out of.'
'You don't necessarily die of it, you know,' I said feebly. 'Never you mind you just watch it that's all.' At that point Mr Davis put his spoke in. 'Funny you should mention August 1957,' he said. 'That was when I was in St George's having my first op. May have been July, but I'm almost sure it was August.'
And so it went, and still goes, on. Even at night they can't shut up. Tetomania lives and lives right here in King George V ward. Thank God I'll be out on Wednesday. I think it's Wednesday. Could be the Thursday or Tuesday, but I'm pretty sure it's Wednesday. `Ovaltine or Horlicks, Mr Stanhope?' Ovaltine please, one and a halt sugars and could you oblige me with a cigarette until tomorrow?'
It is dawn now and the old colostomy that has been mothered all night long by the nurses and abused in return has at last fallen asleep. Temperatures are being taken and the Indian gentleman opposite me has broken wind for the last time and now lies in bed like an emptied, slack balloon. I've been round with the tea and now, the next treat we have to look forward to, will be breakfast. One lukewarm hard-boiled egg and a slice of bread and marg. It's life that goes on, even here.
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