WE are taking Geoffrey for his monthly fluid intake at the hospital, a good day for everyone as his memory seems to improve and his walker raises an inch higher than his feeble average.
Geoffrey’s in aged care and spends his days trading stories with fellow residents who can’t remember what they had for breakfast. Rinse and repeat. It’s groundhog day for the lot of them, but they seem content.
Wanda walks off when I start telling tales I’ve repeated ad nauseam, so Geoffrey’s ahead on the scoreboard when it comes to captive audience.
I write as I sit in the waiting room, reflecting on my perception of cold, slippery runways smelling of disinfectant as nurses with beards (no gender bias here) scowl into their third chin as they hunch their way to the next patient.
I sympathise. Sick people are, by pure nature of their condition, not always overly welcoming. Health care can’t be easy, hearing of people’s ailments for eight hours must be like watching all-day sport. It’s fine if you’ve got a beer in one hand and a volume switch in the other.
And in fairness, grumpiness is a disease easily transferred. In previous times, I’d say easier to catch than a common cold. Now, analogies are of pandemic proportions. Boom, tish.
Neither are doctors immune, but I have theories about smart people’s sense of humour requiring a higher level of intelligence to my own brand, learned in an uncultured environment and best left for Geoffrey who at least feigns interest and musters a giggle between Ventolin puffs.
I look around this hospital though, and while I see the odd grimace, I see friendly people saying “good day” in various accents and dialects of colloquialism.
I’ve long held a view that hospitals are for people like Geoffrey. Or death. It’s all rather final, and perhaps why in younger days I’d felt hospitals just weren’t for me, like it was an option.
Then I think why I’d allowed the bowel test to expire. It was fear, not laziness. In actuality, I really should have seen things a different way.
What I’m seeing here is a place of compassion, a glass half full arrangement where people come to be repaired and not laid to rest.
A doctor of all people, shares a joke with a wards-person, if that’s what we’re calling the person wheeling a trolley filled with equipment that can only be described as dangerous.
People with babies, the occasional broken leg, an old fella patched with a few bandages. The persona is positive, a place where life is given, not taken.
As I recalibrate, I wonder whether my previous perception was an old-school view of a bricks and mortar institution – a hospital being a place where people go not to be fixed, but to be ill.
My mind is much better fared thinking of the people within the walls of scientific innovation and invention who spend their hours finding new ways to repair the broken, fix imperfections, and allow vibrant futures.
The poop kit may have expired, but I’ve taken the time waiting for Geoffrey to ask for another one.
Because, I now know I won’t cop a scowl and a reprimand for my poor health care habits. Instead, my observations as I sit and wait tell me that I’ll be in the hands of people determined to find a way, whatever it takes, to iron the wrinkles from a body we all know won’t last forever.
Better late than never, right Wanda? The eye roll is deafening.
