In AUGUST, the skies grow dark with the falling bodies of columnists, and each dawn those sturdy denizens of the Liffey shore who subsist on a diet of esturial flotsam find columnar cadavers bobbing blackly on the water's edge. Quickly frisk the journalists' bodies - a naggin of meths, a few brass coins, an obsolete press card dated 1973 - and then ease the corpse back into the departing tide. It's how he would have wanted it. . .
August is a truly dreadful month for those who write daily for a living. I have too often written laudatorily of the only citizen whose season it is, the common wasp, to be comfortable doing it yet again. What could I do to ease the unbearable burden of writing through the full month of August, and also spare the world yet another column of winsomely vespine musings?
Silly season
I know! I'll have a tumour!
It was in my neck, and had been growing there for years (you have to plan well ahead to prepare for the August silly season). By the time that it was diagnosed, it was the size of an ambitious potato. Even though a CT scan suggested it did not seek lebensraum elsewhere in my body, that it was a tubby little Belgium munching waffles rather than a lean and sinister Third Reich oiling tanktreads, it is only human at such moments to fear the worst.
That's when Basil does his bit. Basil is the little corner of the human brain whose job is to be pessimistic. I write columns for a living. Basil fears the worst. Basil is merely doing his professional duty when he declares in a low, flat, carrying voice as the plane wobbles on take-off: Uh-huh. Not going to make it this time, chum. With odious certainty, Basil transforms a delayed train bearing a loved into a rail smash with no survivors, or turns an infantile sneeze into the onset of a lethal plague.
So, yes, though my specialist had said there was nothing to be scared of, and the scan showed that my neckly inhabitant was benign - Look, there it is, still eating waffles, not a Panzer to be seen - Basil still murmured in the lightless watches of a wakeful night: Misdiagnosis. Happens all the time. Secondaries are at this moment rampaging like einsatzgruppen through your body. And what about the operation? Your anaesthetist will turn up drunk and will overdose you. Brain-death, the surgeon will finally intone after a futile struggle; we can do no more: turn off the machine, nurse, and a moment's silence, please. Or, adds Basil gloatingly, a confusion of trolleys, a gallant attempt at a hysterectomy, and by mid-afternoon, your heart'll be on offer in Harefield, your kidneys will be commodities in the renal marketplace, and by nightfall some poor misfortunate bastard will be getting your liver. . .
Humming and hawing
Basil's job was made all the easier by the fact that I'd never been in a hospital before; never had an anaesthetic, never had strangers clustering around man-made orifices in my body, murmuring: Oh dear me, don't like the look of that. My experience of hospitals had been confined to humming and hawing beside friend's beds, making free with their Ferrero Rocher and wondering when I could in all decency cut and run.
Worse, Basil added gleefully, you're not going to an established hospital. You're going to that new place in Tallaght, where the night shift consists of a tramp with a barrow wandering the wards crying, "Bring Out Your Dead", and you can't sleep because of the din of grave-diggers and their secret burials in the flower-beds - No, Mrs Murphy, we can't seem to find your husband in this hospital at all, have you checked with the Mater? - and nurses use needles the size of a wall cavity-filler and. . .
So much for Basil. Firstly, the tumour was Belgian through and through, had no wish to plant Reichkommissars throughout out my body, and obligingly exited, sweet as sixpence, at the moment of asking. Secondly, it is my pleasure to declare that, benign as the tumour was, its benignity was nothing compared with that of Tallaght Hospital. In my entire life, I have never encountered the efficiency, friendliness, care, intelligence, humour and professionalism which is the daily portion in Tallaght. Individually and institutionally, it is quite superb. Even the food was excellent. Those who work in and manage Tallaght Hospital have every reason to be proud.
For all that the people at Tallaght Hospital did for me, medically and psychologically, I simply do have not the words to convey my sense of gratitude. Even Basil quailed before their efficiency and fell silent.
Questions
But I do have a question or two to ask more generally: how is it possible that an organisation which, in my experience, is simply without equal anywhere, is so chronically deprived of funds? Why are there such delays in finding beds for patients?
Why are consultants - who are usually on duty from just after seven each morning - obliged to put in seven-day working weeks throughout the year? Why do nurses have to work such gruelling hours that when they begin their final shifts at the end of a working week they are already completely shattered?
Is it because, unlike any other group in the public service, the medical profession will work regardless of conditions? In other words, do we deprive our nurses and doctors of funds simply because we can? No imaginary blue flu for them: just ceaseless duty tackling real, unimaginary illness.
To everyone in Tallaght Hospital: thank you.