IMAGINE BOARDING a flight to France for a relaxing weekend trip, and finding mid-air that you’re being diverted to Central Asia, and won’t be coming back home any time soon. That’s rather how I felt when my innocent-seeming visit to a doctor’s surgery became a rushed journey to hospital and five days tied by tubes, drains and monitors to a ward bed.
Going to hospital can be very like adventure travel in one of the world’s more exotic and remote nations. As I settled into Hospital-stan, I had that “new country” feeling of being surrounded by locals who knew how things worked while I didn’t have a clue. There were strange smells, and unfamiliar foods (or in my case, nothing to eat or drink at all for the first three days), as well as a new language to learn with its confusing vocabulary of IVs, cholecystitis and CT scans.
Oh, and there was the colourful national costume I had to wear. My enforced spa-break being a bit of a surprise, there’d been no time to pack a “holiday wardrobe” suitable for lounging around in. So, I was issued one of those sprig-pattern theatre gowns, though I turned it around so that rather than sending a cold draught up my bum it looked more like a dressing-gown. Or a kimono. Or, mostly, a 1940s tea-frock.
Paired with compulsory-issue, full-length, white DVT stockings I looked like Jack Lemmon drag-dressed in Some Like It Hot.
Travels abroad, especially in countries where medical services are basic or virtually non-existent, are good preparation for hospital stays back home. My rare and reluctant visits to the ramshackle hospitals or shack dispensaries that the bulk of the world’s population rely on for health, always remind me just how good Irish hospitals are, despite HSE cuts, delays and overworked staff.
My first serious brush with illness abroad was malaria in post-coup Burkina Faso in the 1980s. I was saved by a Peace Corps volunteer who reckoned that I had a better chance of survival on the clean floor of a hut in her compound than I would have in Ouagadougou’s crowded and unhygienic hospital. Almost certainly she was right. I was delirious and rarely conscious for most of a week, but with her 24-hour care and massive doses of chloroquine, I survived.
Over the following decades I’ve been – or, more often, taken other people – to some frighteningly rough medical centres across Africa, South America and Central Asia. Whether seeking treatment for car crash injuries, horse falls, burns, snake-bites or dysentery, few of them were pleasant experiences. And especially not the trips to five different, but equally filthy, rural North African hospitals for a series of stomach injections after I was bitten by a potentially rabid dog.
If it was necessary to have holes cut in me, then, I was grateful it was happening in Ireland. I wasn’t the only one. Gingerly walking the corridors for exercise I was stopped by a fellow patient. Middle aged and recovering from a car crash, this was his first time in hospital.
The experience had made him thoughtful. “Tell me,” he demanded, “what do you think of being in here?” I braced myself for a litany of self-pity and complaint. He continued, “Because I’m amazed.” He grabbed my arm for emphasis. “I am amazed by the kindness I’ve been shown here.” I agreed. Despite the pressures of their work the hospital staff, at every level, still found time for an encouraging word, a smile, or the giving of some dignity to the essentially undignified process of being ill. It brought to mind the Peace Corps worker who three decades before had selflessly looked after me, a stranger.
I realised that whether spending time in hospital or on foreign travel, one’s survival often depends more on a shared sense of humanity than on technology; though in medicine the clever hardware helps, too. But what is remembered after much else is forgotten is the kindness of people.