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What's written below is not to be taken seriously; angels with harps of gold populate this establishment and I have profited from their hearts of gold. Also the car-park payment system is ace |
Hereford County Hospital – my alternative home since Christmas – demands I decode its language. I am, after all, a retired wordsmith.
At the rear a signpost: The Morgue (Non public). For weeks I
imagined a public morgue: tickets, guides, pots of tea at the end. A reluctance
to utter the word “corpse”. Visitors who aren’t keen to chat afterwards.
At the front another sign: Strongbow Unit. How might archery
impinge on, say, chemo or CT scans? Hereford was once home to the cider giant,
Bulmers. Mundanely Strongbow is a cider brand. Money disbursed in exchange for
commercial exposure. It makes the world go around.
On my long walk through the building to Macmillan Renton
Outpatients (Renton was a Hereford surgeon) I infer the Class War on the Minor
Injuries door. It appeals to my snobbism, knowing my injuries aren’t minor.
Patients are aristocrats or peasants according to their levels of suffering.
Something biblical there.
No doubt many aristocrat patients are to be found in
Intensive Care. A hushed calm prevails; a keypad keeps out the unauthorised. A
bit like the entrance to Fort Knox. More privilege, perhaps, at Upper Gastro-Intestinal,
all of whom drive Volvos and turn up their noses at those in Lower G-I.
I fantasise that surgeons in Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm
Screening all have knighthoods for technical reasons and obscurity of language.
But what am I to make of Maternity Triage? That those who
don’t cut the mustard are given off-peak bus passes and adjustable aluminium
walking sticks?
Finally The Chapel, conveniently and apocalyptically near
Main Entrance/Exit, where those at odds with life may sit and ponder. Slightly
lurid stained glass windows and imitation Scandi furniture. The door is always
open and I’ve never seen a single occupant. But then souls are invisible, aren’t
they?
Good one! Glad you see the benefits of your visits which must not almost be so entertaining, I guess.
ReplyDeleteHere, we have a mysterious Day Clinic but not a Night Clinic, also a Stroke Unit - and, wait for it, Proctology In-Patient Department, which is almost a tautology.
Sabine: I appreciated your response. Thought I might have gone too far with my fancies; thought too the compressed style might have made the post unintelligible. But I see we are reading from the same hymn sheet.
DeleteStroke Unit. Surely, only for cats.
Definitely a retired wordsmith. You can make even a mundane visit for chemo interesting and entertaining. Given a subject I guess you could write an article around it,
ReplyDeleteAvus: Thanks for that. I fear I have in my time been harsh with co-bloggers who've grumbled there's been nothing to write about. Look inwards, I've cried out. Consider the multiplicity of thoughts that pass through the mind during any single second. Always assuming the mind is still alive.
DeleteHospitals are rich with subject matter; no need to pick the obvious. Take the way rank is identified by staff clothing. The way surgeons - in their loose disposable blues and funny squarish hats - amble down the corridors like gunfighters in a Western. How the aged and ill - often on sticks - look terribly uncertain.
Monica Dickens, no Tolstoy she, knew how to tell a tale. Her hospital yarn, One Pair Of Feet, became a best-seller in the fifties. Then she went on to write My Turn To Make The Tea, covering her experiences on a weekly newspaper, and I've always had a soft spot for her.
Mark, read and digest Eliot: "I will show you fear in a grain of sand."