hospital visit

Just back from a visit to the hospital and so many memories have been triggered.
It's forty years since I left the place but each time I call in the clinic at the main entrance I am reminded of the love affair that started in the building next door, the old casualty. He was a porter and I a student nurse. He had had an adventurous life and I was as green as grass. We embraced in the old porters' lodge across the road just before I went on night duty, he was my first port of call as I went to the wards, in the morning, and he was ready to leave after a night shift.
Further up the drive was the red brick, barrack-like, structure of the Nurses' Home -where we started off under the eaves as cadets, and moved from floor to floor depending on where we were in our training. I always said it was a cross between a convent, girls school, and military establishment - the only thing we didn't have was a service number.
Today, I decided to take the courtesy bus from one end of the hospital to the other. There is much re-building going on, as everywhere else, and the corridors I trod have been shorn of their outbuildings. Up the hill, the Lecture rooms, where the Principal Sister Tutor held austere sway are dilapidated and blanketed in new brick. Round passed the Clock Tower, anno domini 1878, glass and chrome cover the ghosts of Burns, Tennyson, Longfellow, Keats, a literary cloak to hide long rows of geriatric, psychiatric beds, and the locked units where the immoral girls were kept - the irony being they had been locked up to try and curb their pubescent sex drive and I had to leave because my sex drive made me an unmarried mother at 20. 30 years, or so, earlier and I could have been one of them!
Now into the relatively shiny new orthopaedic clinic where, what ever the surroundings, the waiting is just as interminable. And people don't change.
My ability to wait and watch started very early when you saw the doctor at 9am and were still waiting in the stuffy, cramped ambulance room, to go home at 3pm. My mother, bless her, had walked the wards before me and, despite herself, built up great reserves of stoicism and self control - she expected no less from me and the training started from the word go. So, no fidgeting, no whinging, no unkind comments about others - we waited our turn, being sensible and patient, after all we could be in a much worse situation and it would end, it really would. I just wanted to get home, get through breaking the news to dad, then onto the sofa,before a roaring fire and get my nose in a book knowing that this was how it would be for the next few weeks - safe, secure and endless opportunity to escape into my imagination.

Today, I seemed to be the only singleton amongst a crowd of orthopaedic couples. The clinic staff seem to plod about looking hangdog and casual - the system must be known to them, one hopes, because it certainly isn't obvious to the patients. Opposite, sits a small, blonde haired, middle aged woman, huddled into an Astrakhan coat. Eventually, a large, louche, man joins her, loud and tapping her thigh with a "Now then my girl..." She brushes away his hand, embarrassed at his hearty familiarity. To begin with I think he's taking advantage, that she doesn't really know him, that she wishes she was somewhere else and I expect her to get up and move away but she doesn't and it becomes obvious that they are together.
He has the face of a frog, he's bigger, coarser featured, with the flushed, almost cyanosed, complexion of a hard drinker. The clothes are good, he has a patterned scarf tucked into his collar, and I notice they they are both wearing similar shades of brown, but it can't hide the roughness that sits uneasily with late affluence. He subsides into the same reverie as the rest of us.
The saw whines in the plaster room. It has been many years since I had a cast removed but I can still feel the tickling sensation of the blade slicing through the gypsum and the sense of anxiety as it closed on the skin. Only the experience teaches you to actually believe the plaster technician when he says the saw vibrates rather than cuts - that it won't slice through the cast into the skin. After the first time you believe because you see with your own eyes but the mind takes more convincing and there is always the tinge of anxiety.
Ancillary staff slob to and fro. Piles of files and x- rays are ferried around in square, metal, four wheeled trolleys not the two wheeled wicker baskets with walking stick handles we used as cadets. And today there weren't enough wheelchairs to move patients who had been decanted from ambulances, into the waiting area but couldn't walk into the consulting rooms and so appointments were held up while staff scoured adjoining corridors for spare chairs. Various names are called and we strain to hear our own, afraid if we miss it then the wait will be even longer. I always remember the Senior Geriatrician giving me a lesson in voice projection the first time I did his clinic. He had been in the Brigade of Guards, an Old Contemptible, and always walked with great long strides carrying a furled black umbrella. It was my first out patients clinic and he sent me out with a set of notes to call "Mrs Smith" - no response so I tried another patient, still no response. He came out with me the third time and directed my attention to the fact that not only was it busy and noisy in the waiting area but Mrs Smith could have been to the toilet, be entering via the ambulance area or just plain deaf. "Lift your chin, Nurse, turn to your left, raise the pitch of your voice and call the name. Now, try it to your right, then finally, if there's still no answer, to the body of the clinic."
Of course Mrs Smith was there all the time, chatting to her neighbour and deaf, and the pimply nurse, feeling and looking unsure of herself had directed her voice into the buff manila folder of her notes.
I have often wondered whether something similar ought not to be mandatory training for clinic staff, especially as now I am the deaf one struggling to hear my name when a bored, staff member mumbles my name from the other end of the corridor, into my buff manila folder of notes.

Then, I am in to see a doctor and he's actually courteous enough to stand as I enter and shake my hand. He examines my fat, unattractive knees, reads my notes, checks my slightly less unattractive orthotic shoes and tells me we will leave well alone for another six months.