A healthy respect for life
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday, September 29, 2012
Section: Opinion

Life, interrupted: in hospitals, you find all the lonely people. Where do they all belong?

I’ve been spending a lot of time in a public hospital lately, visiting the dearest of girlfriends. She is no stranger to chronic illness, but this time she scared us. Out of immediate danger, she now lies in a room pasted with photos of her small angel-haired son as streams of visitors take turns keeping vigil by her bedside.

I’m one of those people, urging her on, whispering  fighting words in her ear, silently cursing an illness so fierce it chose at whim to blacken five days of her life with a coma. On the long walk from the carpark, I have become acutely aware of the divide between well and sick – I feel almost guilty, not grateful, to be in rude health with no reason for marking time. Twice now, I have passed the same elderly man huddled at the bus stop. I can’t tell if he is wishing the bus would come, or just thankful for a place to sit, protected from the wind. He looks worn down by the business of living, weary of his age. How does he come to be here? Is there someone waiting for him somewhere?

All along the corridors of Ward 71, left and right, doors half ajar, I see glimpses of lives visited by sickness. The signs of infirmity are everywhere:  the musty air and the strange medical smells, the half light, windows with a view of more windows, all shut to the outside world. The only energy I feel is from the nurses, so cheerful there is no small comfort too big to ask them for – the place enlivened with their briskness and busyness.

Squeezing in behind a gurney in the giant lift, I’m given a close up of someone wrapped in a white blanket : a middle-aged man too unwell to care if I see him at his most vulnerable, at his lowest ebb. The orderly smiles at me across his parcel: for him, moving between floors with a patient on a trolley is part of the ups and downs of an ordinary day. For me, it’s like stepping into another dimension, the underbelly of the human condition.  A half-life of bedpans and hacking coughs and pressure stockings.  Another world we all acknowledge, but vainly hope never to enter.

Nothing reminds you of your good health more than seeing someone without theirs. Even small tastes of illness signpost how the spirit can falter when sick. Unless you’re Clive James, terminal with leukaemia, (and recently kicked out of home for infidelity), telling a journalist:  ‘In my life I have managed to get a certain amount done, and my chief aim now is to live longer so that I can do more.’ Usually, fear of the unknown is the default position when ill health announces itself, until doctors reassure us modern medicine will save us. Or at least give us reasonable odds. Then it’s down to mental grit: can we overrule a mind that threatens to run wild with doubts and panic, that carries us off down dark gloomy alleys morbidly pointing out the dead ends. Conquer that subconscious traitor and you’re on the road to recovery.

I have been desperately sick only once, eight days after my third baby was born. A post partum haemorrhage that threatened to be my undoing, just as I’d completed the miracle work of giving birth. Not once during that 12 hour ordeal, with teams of doctors swapping shifts through the night, and the father of my week old baby left to his own devices behind the throng of white coats and soft soled shoes, did I ever let myself believe I would leave my family. But I saw the looks on the faces of the emergency team, as they smiled down at me and squeezed my hand, and gave each other those  lingering glances that meant I was in real trouble.

I never considered I might die – I had my new baby fretting in the hospital nursery for her mother’s smell and touch. There were two young boys whose lives would falter without their mum. And a husband who hadn’t planned on raising his family alone.

I have rarely thought about that time until now, weaving my way along hospital corridors to the bedside of my friend. My lovely friend, who has known no end of sickness by (ill) virtue of the awful junction between her genetics and advancing age. On she fights, frail now, but robust enough of mind to know she too, is needed by many.

Through it all, there are the constant reminders of what she can no longer do or be – that bastard disease hungry for the healthy parts of her. Doctors, one after the other, testing their own limits to rebuild a body under siege, trying to reverse the damage already done with ever more arcane treatments. And what of the girl I grew up with, in and out of hospitals her whole adult life, now mother to a 6-year-old, confined to a bed yet again? Where is her freedom to just ‘be’ – her independence curtailed by the nemesis inside her, and on the outside, by those whose job it is to save her with endless tests and doctoring.

What can illness teach us? We can fantasise about endlessness, knowing full well the end will come to all of us. But often the transformation from person to patient is insidious. Our lives suddenly on hold as  the enemy infiltrates our defences and takes away our control.

I have known those who regard their sickness as a companion, no friend but no foe. An unwanted  possession to be outgrown, outwitted and outlived.  The American essayist Susan Sontag wrote that: ‘Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.’

What of the old woman in the next room to my friend? Residing in ‘that other place’? Just a small face above the sheet, always alone, her wispy white hair a tangled halo on the pillow. Where are her visitors? Are there children or a husband to love? She looks peaceful when asleep, as she mostly is when I pass by. I wonder if she will ever leave this place, with its ticking machines and constant footsteps, for the peace of her own home, wherever that might be? Will there be some other freshly made bed, comforting and familiar from which to recover from her sickness?

George Bernard Shaw once said “I enjoy convalescence. It’s the part that makes the illness worthwhile.” For my childhood friend, the convalescences get longer and more torturous, small parts of her lost along the way. How long will her recovery take this time? How much more damage will be done?

Feeling utterly useless, I will use my sturdy health to replenish hers, if by doing nothing more than breathing the same air in a stuffy room screened by a blue curtain. I’ll take her my childrens’ drawings and let her see herself as a stick figure in a glittery dress with a crooked smile. And I’ll whisper the story of an old man huddled at the bus stop who was rewarded at last, when an old friend pulled up in a car to take him home.