As I wander the wards lost in a fog of exhaustion, the edges of pain and suffering are everywhere, sticking their icy points into my hips and knees and cheekbones.
The day before, I had finished my term in the labour ward. From birth to death, one day to another, simply and cleanly, with no fuss, no bother.
But death visits everywhere. As the young woman, her barely formed child dead within her, knew. That was her second, there would be no more. They would all die, the same way. She turned her face from mine: I touched her shoulder and she winced.
Other women pushed out fleshy, noisy creatures, who bounced around on the beds with health. Liam nearly flew right off the sheets, eyes wide, arms spread out, prepared for anything and everything, glad to be free of water and on dry land. His mother cried whenever she laid eyes on her deserting sailor-boy.
A resounding explosion of wind is followed by a precise pause in the ward round. The man responsible keeps his eyes closed. I carefully pull back the curtain and see a small smile on his face.
The smile sits below what used to be his nose. Cancer has eaten it away, and now he spends his days here in flatulence and spite, hissing and snapping at anyone who approaches.
I invariably smile and speak softly to him but he grates his nails on my bedside manner.
I am in a cauldron of cancer, boiling and bubbling away the body parts of anyone unlucky enough to fall in, leaving them to flounder, damaged, in a merciless world. The farting man knows he is doomed to be lonely, and cuts us to pieces with his tongue in revenge.
Turning too quickly now, I nearly forget where I am, and instead of welcoming baby, farewell constipation with enema tubing. The patient, at least, is relieved.
It will take time for me to adjust.
He is holding in the hurt, and groaning. The nurse calls me, but I look to her for guidance. We sense there may be nothing to do but wait, and waiting is agony.
“Morphine,” says the specialist.
“It will kill him,” says the nurse. His lungs are cobwebs.
I go back to his bed, and look at him. His face is grey and moist, his body restless. He is only sixty, but already dead. He was dead five years ago when he couldn’t walk much further than to his postbox, couldn’t play with his first grandchild without heaving and puffing like Thomas the Tank Engine, then found, gradually, that a few steps were as much as he could take.
When he came to us, nine days ago, sitting up in bed was more exercise than his lungs could cope with, and he wore an oxygen mask as a more or less permanent adornment. He could barely speak, his humanity subsumed to concentrating solely on sucking whatever air he could get into whatever was left of his lungs.
Now, something else has happened, another part of his body has broken, and I don’t know what it is. By the time I find out, he will be cold, his wife and sons grieving.
The nurse slips the needle in, gives him relief, makes me feel better.
An hour later, he is still with us, though his chest heaves less and less, his skin fades, his bones seem to reach out to me.
I am either on the phone pleading to the gods for help, or holding his hand, pleading for him to die with each breath.
Afterwards, I have to give someone a sleeping tablet, listen to someone’s lungs, someone else’s heart, look in another’s eyes. It is midnight before I carefully place my half-empty cup of cold coffee on the table, turn my beeper off, and walk out into the star-filled night.
All this in a fog. I know not what I do when the day is over, except that everything is quiet and black and I am alone. I don’t go home with anyone for nights of abandon. I sit on the bare boards of the narrow balcony and listen to birds, watch skinks scurry, and bathe in flames of dying light.
Night-shift work dulls the senses, cocoons me in a world of sickness and plastic tubing. My feet trace the corridors, hopeful snail, wanting no one to notice me. I ring the medical registrar, and he cuts me off mid-report, saying he’ll be down there soon. He transforms when he sees me in the romantic light of fluorescent bulbs at midnight, and I can almost see the surge of hormones reach his eyeballs. I turn to the patient’s records, plunging into a detailed description of irregular, bloody bowel movements and inflamed, excoriated, rectal mucosa. This does not dampen his ardour.
I go home at three in the morning, eyes wide, head buzzing.
Sleep is an alien thing on these nights, slithering through the sheets, too slippery to get my hands on and hold, so I lie back and wait. Instead of sleep, there are flashbacks of needles filled with morphine, camouflaging pain, easing bodies through another four hours. Pus and blood and bone and bowel dancing their way through a tragicomedy of illness and surgery and drugs. I just want to wave an enormous magic wand over all of them to make them well, this community of sick people, subjected to varying degrees of ignominy, pain and hope. I want to smile and grant them absolution, to be their saving angel, to receive thanks for banishing agony and colostomies, rashes and catheters, gangrene and cold, sharp steel.
Instead I trace the carpeted corridors, scribbling exalted/humbled words of the consultants (yes, the tumour appears to have regressed; no, I’m sorry…), sticking needles into veins, tapping chests, listening for the whooshes and clicks of abnormal hearts, holding hands, ordering drugs, holding back, checking wounds, holding hands, holding charts, holding back, holding on, holding on.
Late at night, my beeper leads me to a woman who will have her right breast removed tomorrow morning. Cancer, advanced: malignant creature, the stereotyped crab with its nipping claws, destroying all in its path with short, sharp stabs. She knows the surgeon has a good reputation, he even smiled and told her what would happen. She wants to be good, to be no problem to anyone, is sorry to have disturbed me.
“I feel all of a sudden a great panic in my chest,” she says. “It frightens me. I’m not sure why I feel this way. Death doesn’t worry me. I don’t have young children to look after anymore. They’re all grown up, have families of their own. My husband has gone to grave ten years. I have lived a good life…”
The ward is silent where we are, a tiny bubble of our own world, immersed in disease. I am sitting on the side of her bed, her warmth seeping into me through her experienced skin.
“My son is embarrassed when I talk about death. He wants me to lie here quietly and listen to him, and to the doctors, and just be my usual, quiet self. He tells me not to be silly, I’m not going to die, and I tell him of course I am, I’m old, I’ve got to die sometime.”
She flutters a hand around her neck, her eyes glisten.
“I should have been louder when I was young and first married. I should have made more noise, spoken my mind, made people listen to me. My son, and my friends, don’t expect anything but calm acceptance from me, and I feel that I want to shout the roof off. They see me in the garden, and they think I’m happy, pottering with my sweet peas. Doesn’t seem to be much else to do anymore…”
My leg has gone numb, but I do not move. I want to listen to this woman forever. She tires before my eyes, though, unused to words coming from her own mouth.
“I received all the words of comfort when the worst was known, and the priest came to see me, and prayed with me. But I only seemed to be aware of an absolute silence. I tried so hard to pray, but the dead disturbed me, as if they all sat there at the edge of my bed and stared.”
She takes a breath, and another, as she points to where her feet form two peaks under the bedclothes. Then she raises her hands to her cheeks.
“I saw something in their eyes. Disappointment. This feeling in my chest, too. This life… not fully lived.”
She grips my hand, the edges of her nails biting into my skin, as her eyes drift to the sliver of night sky visible where the curtain is not quite drawn closed.
