SNAPSHOTS

One of the more fascinating aspects of making regular, if reluctant, trips to the hospital on visiting duties, is the number of tiny snapshots you get into other people’s lives which you wouldn’t ordinarily see.

Those off duty moments where a tired-looking nurse is heading home after a long shift, or the jolly banter between members of the cleaning staff when they meet in a corridor. Then there’s the bored-looking nurse who’s just sloped off to the coffee shop for a pick-me-up, and the porter with his crackling walkie-talkie.

Then there are those who don’t have to work there; The lost-looking family who are trying to work out where the ward they’re supposed to be visiting actually is, the bereft looking ones who are just leaving after a long or rather tough visit, or the ones pushing a wheelchair transporting a relative in a dressing gown towards the shop in search of supplies.

Sometimes you pass by an open doorway where someone is just sitting and keeping an unconscious figure in a bed company, and when you go again the next day, and the next, the same scene is repeated and looks as if it has been for quite some considerable time and may very well continue to do so.

When I first arrived at that particular hospital a few weeks ago when round two of this latest version of my own family’s sad old tale began, I was most struck by the number of patients there who seemed to be missing limbs. “Uh-oh!” I thought, “This is a place where they’re very quick to amputate…” because there seemed to be an above average amount of such people hanging around in and around the lobby.

Interestingly enough, it only dawned on me later that many of them might have been heading outside for a crafty drag on a cigarette or three, despite the fact that an addiction to them might have been what led to them being there and in that unfortunate situation in the first place. I even saw an entire family pushing a chap in a wheelchair, plus his drip and oxygen cylinder, outside the door so that he could have a fag…

Oh well, I suppose when you’re that far gone, you’ve got to get whatever pleasures you can out of what time you have left to you, and I don’t suppose that when you have got to that stage, another one is going to do you any more harm…

Now, it must be pretty obvious to everyone that, because the people you are seeing are actually in a hospital, whether it is an a patient or as a visitor, they are probably going through some kind of personal crisis and are unlikely to be at their best. After all, I imagine that few people find themselves wandering around the corridors wondering about how they are looking or what other people might be thinking about them, they’ve probably, as they say, got other things on their minds…

What always strikes me, though – perhaps because I’m usually feeling the same way myself – is the general air of fatigue and weariness that abounds throughout the place, whether it’s from the bewildered chap trying to make sense of the baffling instructions on the food dispensing machines, or the sharp glances which stifle an unexpected raucous laugh, the whole place just has an air of feeling utterly knackered about it.

It’s a bit like being at a dreadful dinner party that nobody really wanted to go to and where everyone in it wants to leave but nobody wants to be the first to leave, and there’s that constant sense that somewhere behind the scenes someone is battling furiously (and ultimately to no avail) to keep the thing going long after the rest of society had given it up as a totally lost cause.

I think it was the late, great Claire Rayner who once said that if you ever go into hospital, you should leave your dignity at the door and, whilst I’m sure she was referring to being a patient, I’m pretty sure that her statement might be applied just as well to many of the visitors and, perhaps, even one or two of the staff.