HOSPITAL CITY

Hospitals are just weird cities. I seem to have been visiting at the end of the days, when it feels like I’ve walked in on the tail-end of something long and tiring. Exhausted faces wander the corridor, backpacks slung over one shoulder, lanyard dangling and soft shoes giving themselves away on the squeaky floor. The little shops are all closed, grey shutters pulled to the polish, and signage switched off. Someone mops. Someone else pushes a rattling trolley. A few hours ago, I imagine, this hallway was chaos.

Then there’s the ward. My dad of course, is in the Acute Stroke Unit, same as my Mum all those years ago. Through the rubber-sealed double doors, past the steadily blinking intercom and hand sanitisers, round the very wide curved reception desk and into the hum of curtains, machines, white boards, posters and clocks. It smells of TCP.

Weird cities indeed. Everything is connected, everyone has their place and their uniform and their role. Once again I wish I knew the difference between the nurses in dark blue, in light blue and in white. How do you address them? Do I need to?

I didn’t really. One of the whites came and took my dad’s blood pressure. She was nice. Then a dark blue came and said hello to everyone on the ward. She was exactly the kind of person you want as a nurse, I thought. She greeted my dad by name and asked how he was doing.

I found the ward a bit difficult actually. There were old men in every bed. Wild hair, gaunt faces, angular limbs. One kept crying out, “Help!” in a loud, raspy voice. I don’t know how my dad has slept these three weeks. It’s about time he was heading home.

“Don’t grow old,” warned my Mum, half smiling. My eyes widened a bit in the glaring light around Dad’s hospital bed. Everything within me wants to avoid everything about this place. I never want to be there, staring helplessly up at those ceiling tiles. And yet every day of my life is certainly connected to the next. Perhaps there’s a chain of days, of mornings, noons and nights, leading inexorably to the last day of my life. And statistically… the old men’s ward in hospital city… well I just don’t know what to think about it.

Life’s so fragile. What if it were over tomorrow? What would you say you’ve achieved? How do you make sure that between now and hospital city, you live, and I mean really live?