Patient

by Ben Watt

  Patients came and went on the ward. Some men would get restless and fidgety after only two or three days, as they got over operations for piles or prostates. If they racked up ten days they would start to get proud and hardened, thinking they were veterans until they asked me or Kevin down in the end bed how long we had been in.

  If I could say five weeks, Kevin could say twelve. Kevin was thin, with stringy long red hair, and probably only my age or even younger. He had suffered dreadful abscesses in his chest cavity from drug abuse. His eyes were beads in their sockets, intense and shining. The nurses would jack him up with opiate alternatives when the pain got bad, and I would watch him slide off the edge into a reeling, sleep-filled haze for a few hours. His parents would come regularly. They were quiet people, bringing fruit and sweets. On the days before he finally went home, some time later, he shuffled up and down the ward in disposable foam hospital slippers, a purple T-shirt and pyjama trousers, smiling and talking intensely, like he was still wired. The day before he went, the nurses baked him a cake and he had a tiny party in the day-room.

  As a group – perhaps only one or two of us talking, while the others in nearby beds listened – a bond would emerge in the periods between ward rounds and visiting times, away from the scrutiny of doctors and the quiet flustering of relatives. The bond’s common language was the wink, delivered across the room to the person opposite, as if to say, ‘They all think we’re ill, but we know we’re all right. We’re just having them on.’

  Bert, opposite me, was a master of the wink, performed in good spirits or under duress. He always seemed to be saying, ‘Two pounds of carrots and a bell pepper? I’ll see you’re all right.’

  I casually winked and smiled at a new arrival, Tim, on his first day, as he was being wheeled in from theatre. He was craning his neck and looked nervously around the room. A week later he came over. He picked up a piece of Tracey’s jigsaw and fiddled with it. And then he thanked me for winking.

  Michael, a man from Hornsey, moved into the bed next to me after about a week or so. He had just had major abdominal surgery too. Cancer, I think. It was his second time. Different hospital, though. In his first few days on the ward I saw a reflection of myself as I was at the beginning. Flat out, backache, unable to sleep, dry mouth, desperate for a sip of water, struggling across a vast, infinite desert of dulled pain and fatigue and the drawing up of the body’s resources. His wife had brought him quite stylish pyjamas – black, green and red stripes. He looked smart, but he seemed alarmed much of the time. One night he needed a naso-gastric tube inserted to suck out the pools of bile in his stomach. The curtain was pulled round his bed, but he couldn’t tolerate the tickling as the thin pipe was passed down the back of his nose. A male staff nurse was doing his best to encourage a smooth passage.

  ‘Just swallow now, Michael.’

  The sound of Michael retching cannoned round the ward. He spewed. We heard the gush as the staff nurse was hosed with bile. We started tittering.

  ‘Just swallow. Relax. Swallow. Here it comes. One, two, three …’

  Gush! This time with a groan of despair as the bile gurgled in his throat. The staff nurse must have been drenched again. He stayed calm.

  ‘Now come on. We’re not getting anywhere.’

  Michael was gasping. ‘I can’t stand it. Please. Take it out.’

  ‘I have to put it in. You know that. We’re halfway there.’

  I knew the feeling. It feels like a strand of half-cooked dry spaghetti is being pushed up your nostril. It touches the back of the throat and, much as dry spaghetti won’t initially soften and curl into the pan of hot water, so the tube won’t turn the corner easily and it jabs against the soft tissue. Gagging is spontaneous.

  ‘OK,’ said the nurse. ‘Hold on for a moment. We’ll stop there.’ Silence. In the ward we held our breath. ‘Ready? Right. Here we go again. Now, swallow.’

  Instantaneously, effortlessly, Michael barked. I heard the force of his bile come up. Like a tap being turned on hard.

  ‘Christ, I’m sorry,’ he moaned. He was whimpering now. The ward was transfixed. Nurses tried to carry on as normal, but we were all quietly astonished. Twice more Michael repeated his performance before the tube was finally in place. When the curtain was eventually drawn back and the sodden nurse had retired, Michael was red-faced, sheepish, exhausted. He looked at me and shrugged. A nurse brought him some clean pyjamas. His stylish stripy ones were taken away, probably to be incinerated. Ten minutes later and he was dressed the same as me. Green poly-cotton. Stamped with a large black logo of institutionalization. ‘Property Of Westminster Hospital & The Riverside Health Authority.’ It had seemed like a rite of passage.

  Blood-pressure readings. One hundred and twenty over sixty, one hundred over eighty. I never fully understood the differential. Nor could I ever see the thin line of mercury in the glass thermometers when they were held up to the light for temperature readings, or feel my pulse pumping in my own wrist, or make sense of the results from the thumb pricks that drew blood for my blood-sugar litmus tests, but I followed all their patterns closely. Blood pressure, temperature, pulse – these are the basic observations of daily life in hospital. Once established, however, I would memorize my temperature movements and be able to quote them at the Prof to one decimal place to disarm him on ward round. After a while I could even guess my temperature quite accurately. I could feel it rising:

  37.6 … 37.8 (learning to recognize the faint sickness it induced)

  37.9 … 38.1 (the loss of concentration and desire to talk to anyone)

  38.2 … 38.3 (a slight fogging of the eyes and the dry, sucking aridity in my head and the back of my neck)

  38.1 … 37.9 (the levelling out and the dropping off)

  37.7 (a severe sweat during an afternoon nap, or in the middle of a restless night, maybe a pang of hunger, a need to piss seemingly incessantly, and the final falling back to …)

  36.9 … 36.8 (like some calm valley after a long ascent)

  Artificially nourished and doped up with drugs, I noticed my hair start to fall out. In the mornings there would be a fine carpet of it on my pillow, and strands would be left hanging from my fingers if I ran my hand through it. I let it grow and swept it back. Audrey, Tracey’s mum, said she never knew I had naturally wavy hair. She said I was very lucky. I let my beard grow too. I felt like Robinson Crusoe, and cornily imagined myself romantically tossed by fate, resolute, adaptable. Sometimes I’d ask my mother for the mirror she kept in her handbag and hold it up to my face and see a man I didn’t recognize, with soft, serious eyes. It was a face of shadows and hollows, and of something learnt. When I was allowed to go to the bathroom to wash myself, I would stand in front of the mirror and look at that same face for minutes on end and would always feel strangely respectful and would quietly say, ‘Keep going’, impressed by the patience I saw reflected. My eyes would burn back at me.

  I noticed how the weather and the outside world held no interest for me. The weather was for other people, out there in their offices and one-roomed flats, their garden sheds and their caravans, for people running for cover on the rain-spattered streets or tramping through the summer’s thick, sulphurous, city air. Tracey and my mum would comment on it, even after a two-minute stroll to the pub on the corner or the nurses-home canteen – how it was mild or muggy or close or fresh. It altered their moods. Summer mornings in ITU had brought Tracey in wearing summer dresses, her bountiful eyes full of hope and light. Humid afternoons meant my mother sitting by a window tugging at the shoulders of her shirt, nurses sighing, a languorous stillness that brought a clock-stopping torpidity to the hours after lunch.

  The newspaper reports lost their importance too. Corruption scandals raged, whole countries were imploding, but more often than not I closed the page, simply too listless or self-centred to pay attention. And even when the test cricket was being broadcast on my transistor radio – something I often looked forward to – I found myself drifting away into myself
or I’d let the earpiece fall on to the pillow and Tracey would lean over and pick it up to put it back and I would just shrug indifference and roll my head back into the middle of the pillow, hoping for nothing more than a comfortable indentation in the polyester filling, so that I wouldn’t have to move or lift my head for half an hour, and so avoid using the muscles down in my belly. I couldn’t care. I couldn’t care at all much of the time. About anything.

  From this quiet disengagement came self-absorption, as I watched and listened out for myself. I regularly seemed to leave myself, and became ego-less, free-floating, non-doing, motionless but for my eyes flicking and blinking, like a lizard on a rock, basking in the alcohol-like fug of Voltarol or the pleasure of being temporarily released from the effects of drugs or pain, until my bed-ridden arse would ache again and I’d have to move, pinching my buttocks together, lifting my pelvis off the mattress, uncrossing my feet to find my calf muscles had gone to sleep again. And maybe another hour would have passed. I would have slumped, my back no longer cushioned in the plump pillows but cross-braced over the bed, a creaking ship’s timber, my neck impacted into the top pillow like the straw in a packing-case. And if I was feeling strong I would reach up for the monkey-bar above my bed and haul myself upright until my back was straight and I was sitting on my sitting-bones, my legs stretched out in front of me like a child, my head loosed and freed, a periscope, cool air passing behind me. And in these hours, often with Tracey silently reading, I felt no anger or resentment, no festering rage at such seeming injustice, at such a seeming non-life, for the question ‘Why me?’ only begs the question ‘Why anyone?’ and the interior world I began to inhabit was not a landscape of fear and stress and acrimony but one where a recognition of my frailty and mortality fed a kind of strength. It felt stylish to be so unwell. I was important to people. To Tracey, my family, surgeons and doctors. And I felt I had the scoop on life and death and everyone else was still running around after it. And should death have come nearby again, as it did on ITU, I would have felt I had slipped under its net once, and perhaps I would do so again. Nonchalantly. With a degree of flair.

  The hot sunny afternoons on the ward made me think of riding home from school in the summer. I’d often find my parents stretched out on the lawn. I’d ride my bike straight down the side of the house, past the dustbins and down to the shed at the end. The sun-loungers would be out. My dad never sunned his back but concentrated on his front. The Ambre Solaire oil would mat his chest hair until it glistened, and he’d sweat it out on hot afternoons flat on his back, all dewy with perspiration. He’d have come down in shorts, not trunks, and an unbuttoned short-sleeved pale-blue cotton shirt with Airtex panels that I liked more than his Greek-style cotton smock-shirt that pulled on over the head and had two front pockets at waist level – one for his lighter, one for his non-filter cigarettes.

  He liked Turkish tobacco and was the first person I ever saw smoking Camel. One of the reasons he fell in with his old friend Brian Rix when they met for the first time in the Air Force at Scarborough was because Brian smoked Perfectos Finos and his family was sending him two hundred a week. He smoked Three Castles when I was young. Green packet. Or Gold Flake. There was a game where I had to count how many ‘l’s’ were on the box. I always missed one.

  My mum would have brought some work down to the garden in a beach-bag. Freelance magazine features – sometimes something big on Richard Burton and Liz Taylor, but often 1,200 words on Trevor Howard or Susan Hampshire or a profile on Noel Edmonds. She’d always bring me back signed photos. Roger Moore. James Galway. The Scaffold. She once asked of Noel Edmonds, ‘Were there any strong musical influences in your life during your teens?’ He replied, ‘Absolutely none. I had no musical convictions or deep-seated knowledge. I’ve been lucky that my whole career has been as a disc jockey.’

  They would both have just settled down when the phone would ring. I hated this moment. There would be a frantic ninety seconds while one of them would launch themselves out of their deck-chair, knocking something over, and sprint round to the front of the house, let themselves in, and race up the stairs to the first floor to catch it before it stopped ringing. There wasn’t an extension at ground level, and the promise of ‘a piece for Vanity Fair’ meant the phone couldn’t be ignored. Mum would sometimes have even left it on the back-bedroom window-sill so they could hear it ring early, but that meant precious time was lost in getting to it. Often it would stop ringing just as we’d hear my dad thundering into the bedroom, and then we’d listen to him cursing and shouting at it.

  Friday and Saturday nights were the hospital’s fight nights. There would often be a late admission on to the ward a few hours after the pubs shut and clubland got under way. A geezer would be trolleyed in out for the count with severe concussion and be put into one of the spare beds freed up after the end-of-week discharges.

  A thickset man was levered into one of the beds opposite me one night. He snored and farted his way through the small hours and then woke with a start as the ward ground into life again at 6.30, disorientated and still half-pissed.

  A nurse came over with some warm cornflakes. ‘Breakfast, love?’

  ‘Wha …?’

  I don’t think he could believe he had been woken. He rolled over in disgust and went back to sleep until the doctors came round at eight. They left him sleeping but made him ‘Nil By Mouth’ – someone had obviously punched him hard enough the night before to warrant caution – and the little plastic sign was hung over his head.

  He finally came to around ten. He looked fiercely unwell. Blotchy and grim-faced, he threw back the sheets and stood up. He certainly didn’t expect to find himself in a back-to-front hospital gown. He fiddled with the tassels unsteadily. All that remained of his best gear from the previous night was a pair of socks.

  He stopped a nurse. ‘My clothes?’ It came out in a croak. He cleared his throat.

  ‘Patients’ Property,’ she said, speeding past. ‘You’ll get them later. You can have a bath if you want. Not too hot, though.’

  He fumbled with the back of the gown, tugging it over his bum-crack, and shuffled off to the bathroom.

  Half an hour later he reappeared. I could see he was hungry. He sniffed round the tea-and-biscuits trolley as it went by. I could see him lining it all up in his mind – eggs, bacon, sausage, tomato, beans, fried slice, mug of tea.

  He stopped another nurse. ‘Any chance of something to eat? I’m starving.’

  ‘Sorry, love.’ She pointed to the sign above his bed. ‘Not for now, anyway.’

  ‘But I’m starving.’

  ‘I’m sure, but Doctor’s said – not me. It’s probably for your own good.’

  ‘But I’m starving. Cup of tea, then?’

  ‘Sorry, love. No can do. You’ve taken quite a knock. I’ll see if you can have sips of water after eleven.’

  He sat down heavily on his bed. His face was grazed down one side, and a swelling was coming up under his left eye.

  A doctor arrived. ‘Ah, Mr Piper. In the land of the living at last. Glad you could join us. Now then, what can you tell us about last night, mmm?’

  He hesitated. ‘Erm, dunno.’ He hesitated again. Nothing was coming. ‘I went down Victoria. Earlyish.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Just a quiet drink.’

  ‘Who brought you in?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘It was around 1.30.’

  ‘Dunno. Some mates, ’spect. Don’t remember.’ He was spectacularly dormant.

  The doctor pressed on. ‘Mr Piper, you were found by two police officers crawling through the flower-bed on the roundabout at Lambeth Bridge with no shoes on, bleeding from a head wound. Do you have any recollection of this?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Maybe. I see …’ The doctor was looking at some notes. ‘And what about your head, Mr Piper? It looks like you were hit with some kind of iron bar.’

  Such grisly tales often unfolded on Sunday mornings and made something of the slow weeken
ds.

  It’s five past six. The curtains have been pulled round my bed. A staff nurse and a student nurse have pulled my sheets back. My abscess has been draining into its plastic bag for several days – red, deep-red, mucous.

  ‘Close your eyes. Relax,’ they say.

  I have been dreading this moment. The drain is to be pulled half out. Through the skin and flesh. I can feel them fiddling with the stitch that holds it in place. I can hear scissors.

  ‘Breathe in after three. One, two, three …’

  I breathe in. The plastic pipe is withdrawn. How far? An inch? A foot? And in that moment I am reeling with anxiety. I stop my mouth with the back of my own hand. I feel my teeth pressing through the skin. In my mind I see the pipe pulling free of the wound, like a shoe pulls away from fresh bubble gum. I feel the pipe moving through my flesh like a pencil through tight polystyrene. I hear the blood flooding to the site. I smell putrefaction. Illness.

  A million brilliant midsummer afternoons rush through me – days on bikes, horse-racing, driving fast, pebble beaches, earthworks, hill forts, swathes of corn, disused railway lines, cold gin, open windows, sunlight turning rivers into tinsel, lollies, poppies, dog-rose. I’m scrambling up a hillside in shadow and the air is cool and my feet slip and the earth is loose and the dust is under my nails and in my hair and mouth and I grasp at small rocks and thistles that have no roots and the grit fills my shoes, my scuffed shoes, and I have no puff and the wound in my side is open and hot and I know I should have stayed on the track and I want to go home and I am going to fall and the ridge is still above me and the sun is on the ridge and a plateau of grass and wild flowers is behind it and over it the brilliant midsummer afternoon recedes.