The power of a bedside manner

I’M GOING into hospital again this week, but I’m not too depressed, because I always meet interesting people on the trolleys.

When I was in Mullingar hospital last summer there was an unshaven sunken-jawed creature in the bed opposite me, with the Westmeath Examiner opened on his lap.

“Where are you from?” he enquired.

“Leitrim,” I said. And that turned into a huge conversation.

I enjoy old men. As a teenager I worked as a night porter in a Cavan hospital and chatting with old men kept boredom at bay. It was either that or listen to BBC World Service all night, because the phone rarely rang after 11pm, unless for an emergency. Then it was all panic stations; nurses fussing around the main door until the ambulance arrived with some woman moaning under the tyranny of her contractions or another old smoker with chest pains.

I didn’t dare enter the maternity ward or the “female medical”, except with a bucket of Savlon once a week to scrub the floor, and even then the women went silent when I entered.

But I was at home in the “male medical”. In there I could chat away till dawn with old farmers who couldn’t sleep, or were confused from heavy medication, and who sometimes thought I was a relative and would shout at me to get up and see to the cattle.

In the morning I collected a urine bottle from under each bed, recorded the volume in the sluice room, and wrote the result on a chart. It was a task of enormous importance and I loved it.

In summer the gardens beyond the windows were full of red and yellow roses, and dew covered the petals at dawn, and the windows were spectacular walls of glass because the hospital was built as a TB sanitorium in the time of Dr Noel Browne, who obviously thought it was good for patients to see the outside world. Although during visiting hours it was sometimes hard to see even the patients through the plumes of smoke that hung over every bed.

Nobody smokes in hospitals nowadays, but old men still haunt the reception area where they can linger betimes and puff cigarettes.

The old man in the bed opposite me last year never smoked but he talked a lot about goldfinches that he used to catch by rubbing birdlime on a stick and which he then sold to housewives who kept the birds in cages hanging outside the doors of their red-bricked houses near the canal.

He talked of larks too that were reluctant to sing when first imprisoned. “A sod of turf was lodged in the cage; half of it jutting out like a veranda,” he said, “and for some reason that enticed the lark to sing.”

He told me that tinkers made birdcages from the spokes of old bicycle wheels.

I said, “Should you not call them Travellers?”

“No,” he said, “a lot of the tinkers I knew were ex-army men, not Travellers at all.”

He was so full of such useless information that we talked half the night away, because both of us were agitated by the prospects of the morrow.

But when the nurse came for me in the morning I was calm because he had been like a guardian angel, assuring me that I had nothing to worry about, and when they wheeled him out towards the theatre he lifted his arm in salute to bid me farewell.

When I woke up later there was no sign of him. A nurse said, “He’s still in the intensive- care unit.” I wandered up later, pulling my drip along behind me, and found him in the corner with the cot-sides up and his head to one side as he slept; his breath no more than a puff that blew his paper thin lips in and out like a draught of wind stretching a cobweb.

I felt sad thinking about all the forgotten history in his cranium that would dissolve if he died, and I wished he’d wake up, but the nurse was tightlipped about his condition. So I returned to my own district, through coronary care, AE and along the corridors where bewildered old people sat up on trolleys like caged birds and gawked about in confusion.

I spent hours staring blankly at the Westmeath Examiner until his trolley arrived, and to my relief he raised his fist and gave me a thumbs up, as the nurses swung him into the bed.