I was in hospital last week visiting the General, who had broken his leg. I parked near the centre of town, and picked up a box of chocolates on the way. The streets were glittery and crowded with families looking for children’s toys and Christmas crackers. An elderly man stood ahead of me at the checkout in Tesco with very little in his basket. It took him ages to pay for his items with cash. And I felt sorry for him as he packed his few things into the plastic bag and struggled out into the rain. I walked up the street with sleet in my face until I saw the lights in the hospital windows above me; beacons of hope in a friendless world.
Hospitals are houses of light, garrisons of love where the staff are singularly devoted to healing. I love the waiting rooms and corridors where nurses and doctors move about in full regalia dressed for theatre, or ward duty with clipboards, and identity badges and stethoscopes hanging around their necks. Some hospitals even have an oratory or prayer room where people can pray to their gods, and some have cafeterias where people can get a cup of tea or coffee and mingle with other visitors and share their troubles.
I remember meeting a woman years ago in the Mater hospital whose husband was having open heart surgery. She was elderly and her husband’s prospects were not good. The thing that really worried her was not her partner’s situation, but wondering what might happen to her if he died.
“We did everything together,” she said, and I could hear in her voice the cadences of a reclusive mind as she munched a biscuit and drank her coffee.
‘He drinks too much. But what else can he do? He lives alone’
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“I can’t cope with being alone,” she concluded.
But I also remember another woman in the Erne hospital in Enniskillen whose husband was about to die and yet she didn’t seem in the slightest bit bothered.
“He used to tell me I had a big nose,” she joked. “And he insulted the shape of my bottom. And when he proposed marriage, he was smart enough to book the hotel before I could say no.” She laughed again.
The shock woke him and he jumped up so suddenly that he landed on his back and broke something in his neck
The General was up on the sixth floor with a spiral fracture near the ankle, which they bound up with a metal plate before wrapping the leg in a surgical cast and a boot that looked like he might be going on a skiing holiday. He sat on a chair with his foot on the bed. The patient opposite was snoring.
“That fellow doesn’t sleep well at night,” the General said. “He drives a van.”
I could see a big nose protruding above the sheets of the other bed, and pallid, tattooed arms resting on the top sheet. Apart from the snoring I might have taken him for dead.
“He’s exhausted,” the General said. “Spends too much time in the van.”
“How could that affect him in here?” I wondered.
“He drives it in here as well,” the General replied. “He drives in his sleep all f**king night. You can hear him talking about the gears being sticky, and then he tosses and tumbles like he is going around bends at high speed. He keeps the entire ward awake. That’s why he’s exhausted during the day. And then he sleeps through visiting hours as soundly as a baby; apart from the snoring.”
“What happened him?” I wondered.
“Apparently he was at home in his bed and he was dreaming that the van was crashing. The shock woke him and he jumped up so suddenly that he landed on his back and broke something in his neck.”
“That’s a mess,” I said.
“He drinks too much,” the General said. “The doctors broached the subject with him yesterday. They wanted to know the details. He admitted a wardrobe of empty whiskey bottles; but what else can he do? He lives alone.”
The General seemed surprisingly compassionate.
“Imagine him trying to cope with Christmas,” he continued, “scouring shops and supermarkets for a tray of chicken breasts and a naggin of Jameson. Trying to negotiate the wet streets with his little shopping bag and that surgical brace around his neck. The poor creature!”
I handed the chocolates to the General and looked again at his leg strapped up in the black surgical boot.
“By the way,” I said, “you never told me how this happened.”
He leaned over to me and smiled.
“I told nobody,” he confessed. “Because I was blind f**king drunk.”