Here’s a vignette: nurse removes a cannula, the tube that puts nutrient and drugs in through a taped needle. There’s a bit of a thing about this because my veins are so hard to find and it takes skill to install one. Then I am shifted to another ward. It turns out I need another cannula, and the nurse in charge of the night station - an older woman - does the job with no fuss and bother, in a trice. Best one, in fact. Then a doctor arrives a few minutes later, and tries to take it off, to put in a new one. I stop her, tell her it has been done by the nurse. The doctor says: “Why did she do that? I do at least 50 of these a day ...” and stomps grumpily off.
I suspect fierce clothing competition. Despite the racial diversity, and the occasional surly but efficient male nurse, the largest group by far is women in their 20s and early 30s, with shiny, shiny wedding rings. They all wear huggy trousers, little tops, and various bits of cardigan thingys over that. A look which I bet shows off any money spent, is reasonably practical for work, and cruelly exposes excess body fat. Particularly brutal because several of them had at least one small child. The women doctors were generally a bit baggier in the fit. I think I even saw a few skirts.
I guess each sector is defined by dress. My favourite was the X-ray unit on the top floor, which is a completely inhuman zone, all empty corridors with glimpses of chairs in the distance, with the occasional cluster of patients waiting like bean bags in the Bauhaus. I floated through on my bed, early in my stay, festooned with plastic bags slopping with very, very ikky things from inside my body.
Advertisement
Somehow the trolley clipped a corner, and one of my waste bags fell off with an ugly splash, breaking across the floor. I just sat there, drugged to the eyeballs, while three immaculately dressed young technicians in high fash black and white flapped around, calling for help, exclaiming about the smell. Stalk-like and horrified.
The cleaners were a sad group. Silent, bent, almost all black, wiping, dusting, mopping, making no contact, they were invisible and unregarded. Each seemed to work in a private bubble of despair, proving with every step that bad things are happening at the bottom of our economy. For the first time, I really saw how big households maintained an army of servants by simply treating them as if they did not exist as human beings. To me, they were an endless reproach.
At the end, with the emergency patients cleared away, I was transferred to the Alfred’s very own Medihotel. Wards with a bit less equipment, with patients able to move around by themselves, needing less direct care.
We are so used to patients being sent home as soon as possible, this area was a sort of anti-space, with its very own ghost population of patients who simply couldn’t get away. People who had endured unspeakable things on other floors, and were in for endless mysterious “tests” and “monitoring”, sometimes for weeks on end. The man who left on my first day in this blood test gulag had been there for 22 days.
As I was wheeled into my final four-bed dock, I was confronted by the sight of a vast, hairy man, almost naked, cross legged on a bed, in hospital for his psoriasis treatment. It was the only moment when I wanted a private room. He was a sort of self-appointed den host, who spent a lot of time on a seat in the corridor, talking happily to anyone who came past. I picked him for one of St Kilda’s many street identities, who probably lived in a boarding house. He had a thing about fluoro lights, and told the staff which ones were dead or dying. I figured he knew a lot about institutions and maintenance staff.
It turns out he has four grown up kids, and is a full-time carer for his wife who had a stroke. He worked for Spotless for 35 years in the plastics division, making bathroom fittings. They supplied hospitals. “The toilet seats here, I probably made them”, he said.
Advertisement
In the other corner was a neat man who proudly informed me he was a veteran of the Royal Australian Navy in World War II, and had lived in Albert Park down the hill since 1976. He never married, but stayed close to his mother until she died at the age of 93. She lived two blocks down from our flat. “You know that Hyacinth Bouquet woman on the television? That was my mother. She was a good woman but she had her traits, you know.”
He was a complete hoot. Eighty-four and still entertaining, addicted to ships, ecstatic about the shape of a bow wave on a cruiser, happily telling me about ship interceptions outside Vladivostok, but discreet about his social life on the bay after the war. He went to work for the SEC in Melbourne power stations, hung around the docks looking at ships, helped in the kiosk at the end of Station Pier, was a volunteer at the National Gallery and knew old gossip back to the days when Roy Grounds designed the new building.
He was in Portsmouth, my home town, during the blitz, and watched it burn from tents on high ground outside the city. The sailors were trucked in each day to work in the docks. They were fed in the seamen’s mess, where hundreds of men queued for their plates of egg and chips and bread in a fog of steam from the urns. Down the end of the line, they stirred their tea with a single teaspoon on a chain.