I wondered where all the old people had gone when I drove into town recently. The street benches remained bare where previously old men, wearing cloth peaked caps and heavy worn suits, used to spend their days sitting and watching the world go by. They’d chat intently amongst themselves and one would periodically reach into his pocket to pull out some shreds of tobacco leaf and a sliver of wafer-thin paper and artfully roll a cigarette using one hand. Other men would greet and heartily shake the hands of locals while staring with amusement at the city folk that shopped in their town over the summer months.
The back wall of churches was another gathering place for these hardy countrymen. They sometimes stood in groups outside the church door, even if there was space within, sharing the odd whispered joke while fulfilling the duty of attending church on a Sunday. Their tractors lined up against the church walls and their battered mud splattered cars, often with trailers, filled the road outside.
Since last Sunday I now know where they have gone.
The local general hospital is a sprawling linked set of building with an enormous car park. I spent almost a full day in the casualty department before dropping a level and moving to a short stay ward called St Josephs. The ward had a central corridor and off it lay several nurse’s stations, toilets and roughly ten rooms of patients containing anything from six to ten patients in each.
It was in four of these rooms that I found the missing old men of the town. I poked my head around the door of one such room and saw them, lined up in bed after bed, dressed in white nighties and appearing barely alive. Some lay on their backs and slept with their mouths open. Others lay on their sides and chatted to their neighbour. Some appeared so still I thought they were already dead. They appeared far from short-stay patients and had the relaxed familiarity of long-stay patients. I recalled the news stories of the elderly clogging up the hospital beds because they had nowhere to go home to after they recovered from illness and I safely surmised that these were them.
One man caught my eye as he seemed to be perfectly well physically but something in his gait and eyes told me he was different from the rest. For one, he wore a pair of blue overalls over which he had slipped on a heavy tweed jacket with padding on the elbows. He wandered without purpose along the corridor, pausing to look at notice boards or stare into rooms but registering little of what he saw on his lined features. He had a bored resigned manner of someone who had long grown tired of his surroundings but was powerless to leave them. The nursing staff knew him well and treated him with a gentle familiarity. “C’mon Noel, back to your bed now” they chided. Over my stay I heard the alarm bells go off twice, setting nurses off in hot pursuit as Noel’s wandering had taken him beyond the wards perimeters. Two nurses would reappear breathless with a bemused Noel in tow. I spent my days sat in a ladies room of 6 patients and saw I wife inadvertently giggle as Noel passed by once again but this time in a self-propelled wheelchair! It didn’t seem right to place Noel in such surrounding neither for him or the staff but all parties made the best of it dealing with each other with good humour and patience.
Transformation
It is astonishing how normal people are transformed into patients by merely donning white pyjamas. It struck home to me when one of the women in my wife’s room was told she could go home. I’d noticed her on our arrival and she looked quite gaunt sitting in the bed opposite. When she left the bed she walked slowly around in a light dressing gown and slippers and looked the very part of a patient. Nursing staff wheeled her in a wheelchair to and from tests and the catering staff delivered meals to her on a table & tray that slid up the bed to her elbows to minimise her movement. Upon getting the news of her release she pulled a curtain around her bed and emerged ten minutes later as a normal human being. She wore a colourful dress, makeup, leather boots and carried a small overnight bag. The transformation was nothing short of miraculous. Previously had she’d died overnight I would have said “oh well, she looked poorly” but now she looked healthy and well I’d have been stunned if she died.
Mobility
My wife was similarly wheeled around in a wheelchair and I came to the conclusion that it suits the hospital or its staff to limit patient’s movements by keeping them in beds or shifting about the hospital in wheelchairs.
If they, the patients were encouraged to walk around rather than be confined to bed there would be chaos. Finding them, the patients for a start! How many tests would be delayed or consultants ward visits made redundant as the patient was absent from the bed? With so many patients to manage the hospital appears regimented and can only function if patients stay in or close to their beds.
The whole experience of staying in a hospital was a shock to me as I live my days in a world of working young or middle-aged healthy people. I shop in outlets filled with fresh food, bright lights and peopled buzzing mobile shoppers and shop assistants. I work in a large open plan office filled with able-bodied and assured people. I play football with dynamic, fast-moving twenty-something’s through to fifty something’s, physically fit and cunningly dexterous. I drive down motorways filled with fast-moving working people’s cars and vans. I socialise with family and friends who are also in that demographic group and to discover this whole other world of sick and aged people that live in a separate yet parallel existence to mine is a shock that I’m still coming to terms with.
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