Volume 196 - Issue 10
Ward 5E Bed 12
Author: Melanie S Cheng
Med J Aust 2012; 196 (10): 654-655. || doi: 10.5694/mja12.10369
Published online: 4 June 2012
Published online: 4 June 2012
Fiona hated the hospital, especially at night. The noises it made then were particularly unbearable: trolleys being wheeled down never-ending corridors, the hurried click of heels across a slick and tiled floor. On the wards, sleepless patients listened to the hushed laughter of the nurses and watched flashlights dance like fireflies behind ghostly blue curtains.
Fiona
Fiona hated the hospital, especially at night. The noises it made then were particularly unbearable: trolleys being wheeled down never-ending corridors, the hurried click of heels across a slick and tiled floor. On the wards, sleepless patients listened to the hushed laughter of the nurses and watched flashlights dance like fireflies behind ghostly blue curtains.
Ward 5E Bed 12. She couldn’t recall the patient’s face — they all started to look the same after a while; cloudy eyes in a web of fine wrinkles, lips fallen wide in a surrendering “O” — but she did remember that there was a vase of wilting tulips by the window and a dog-eared copy of Anna Karenina on the bedside stand.
The dead could wait. That’s what she had said when the nurse had paged her again. And then she had felt bad. Even though it was true.
She didn’t need directions. She made her way towards the small group of bleary-eyed people in the hall. Wordlessly — because death had a habit of silencing even the living — the crowd cleared a path for her to the door.
Fiona found the body amongst a tangle of white sheet. It was a woman, and her hospital gown had ridden up during the drama of dying, to come to rest somewhere just above her waist. Fiona couldn’t help but notice that for her age the woman had a nice figure. Slim, with breasts that were not overly saggy, and a surprisingly flat tummy.
Fiona retracted an eyelid with one hand and waved her pen-torch in an arc with the other. The pinpoint of light skipped across the glossy sclera like an insect across water.
She watched for signs of life: a muscle spasm, a flare of nostrils, a gentle rise of the chest. But the longer she looked, the less convincing the stillness. She jumped at the sudden drop of hair on the pillow, and at the feel of an imagined breath on her cheek.
She picked up her pen. She checked her watch. Time of death: 00:04.
Carly
“Bitch”, the nurse unit manager muttered as she returned the phone to its dock. “Somebody has to put these interns back in their place.”
Carly pretended not to hear. She took another sip from her bottle of water.
“Can you even guess what the waif had the nerve to say to me just now?”
Carly shook her head. It was bad today. She could feel the rising nausea, the thunderous knock of blood, like an angry visitor, at her temples.
“She said ...”, the manager began, turning to face her colleague for dramatic effect. But on seeing Carly, she stopped. “You ‘right?”
Carly swallowed a bolus of bitter gastric juice. She nodded.
“You haven’t looked good all day” the manager said, and stood up. “But we’re on skeleton staff as it is.”
Carly nodded again, this time less vigorously.
“Why don’t you go and remove the lines from Bed 12 and then give yourself a decent 15-minute break.” The manager opened a new game of solitaire on her PC, her outrage momentarily forgotten. “Have a cigarette or something.”
Carly arrived to find a woman standing outside the door to Bed 12. The woman was wearing a faded pyjama top over a pair of old blue jeans. The woman’s fly was undone and for a moment Carly wondered if she should say something. But she didn’t know what the etiquette was, under the circumstances, and so she settled for an “excuse me” as she slipped past the woman and into the airless room.
For a long time Carly stared at the dead woman’s body, furled on the hospital bed. Her nausea had gone. Strangely, all visceral rumblings had ceased on setting foot inside the room. All except for an occasional churning inside her pelvis. Could it be? she wondered, and then corrected herself; don’t be stupid, it’s far too early.
Carly picked up the thick book lying on the dead woman’s bedside table. She read the first paragraph. Something about unhappy families.
She scrubbed her hands with pink antiseptic before removing the intravenous cannula.
The procedure was so familiar that she didn’t see the absurdity of what she was doing.
Margaret
A changing of soiled sheets. An uncomfortable wetness between the legs. The scratch of an adult nappy being pulled across tissue paper-thin skin.
Memories abound. Michael is standing at the top of the staircase. Elise is screaming. He is threatening to leave. It is not the first time. The suitcase he has packed and ready for such occasions is swinging from his tremulous right hand. Somebody shouts: “I could have had a life!” But she can’t be sure whose mouth the words have come from. His? Or hers?
Beeps. Lots of them. Perfectly engineered. Now low-pitched and regular. Later high-pitched and piercing.
Elise
“Well, honey, Nanna is very sick.” Bella stands with her hands on her hips and gives Elise an incisive look. “Remember when we took Brutus to the animal hospital and Dr Kneebone said he was very sick?”
But Bella isn’t buying any of this, and Elise knows it. Barely a day passes when she doesn’t wonder just how she and her insipid husband managed to conceive such a firecracker of a child. But then she thinks that perhaps all children are like Bella. Perhaps she, too, was once brutally and antisocially direct. Perhaps it was only with age that she started talking in circles, saying nothing, going nowhere, upsetting no one.
Margaret, Bella’s Nan and Elise’s mother, has been sick for a long time. Various friends have tried to comfort Elise by saying that a leisurely death is a privilege of sorts; that her mother will eventually drift away, tranquilly and painlessly, like slow-cooked meat from a clean white bone. Oh, how they wish that they, too, had had all that extra time to prepare. But Elise doesn’t know how to prepare herself for the pile of disembodied, naphthalene-smelling clothes. Because there are no smells in imaginations. That’s what makes them imaginations.
The day after Elise’s mother was told that the cancer had spread, she said, “I want you to read me the classics”.
“Not what they call the modern classics”, she replied, using her osteoarthritic fingers to form knobbly quotation marks around the word modern. “Just the literary ones. You know, like Joyce, Chekhov and Tolstoy.”
Everybody knew that Elise’s mother had a suitcase full of unpublished manuscripts under her bed.
“If only I hadn’t had children so young”, she used to say, glancing at Elise for the desired reaction, “maybe I could have made a name for myself”.
So Elise is not surprised by her mother’s final and impossible dying wish. In some ways, she is even grateful for the task. Because it fills the silence. It gives them something to do.
Just after 8, a nurse called Pam tells Elise that she had best make her way in to the hospital. Her mother isn’t dead yet, but she will be soon.
It’s happening, Elise thinks, on a Wednesday, in the middle of July, at the end of an unseasonably warm and cloudless day.
Elise kisses a sleeping Bella goodbye. She pulls off her pyjama pants and grabs a pair of jeans from the top of the dirty laundry pile. She appraises herself in the mirror, smears some foundation under her puffy eyes.
The nurses are sharing a recipe for lemon meringue pie when Elise steps onto the ward. She doesn’t need to say anything. She is like a pyjama-ed apparition in front of the desk. “I’ll take you to her” one of the nurses offers, even though every day for the past six weeks, Elise has managed to find her own way there.
The only light in the room comes from a streetlamp, which flickers outside the window. Dying tulips cast bowed shadows across an empty far white wall. Elise can hear her mother’s breath, one minute fast and hungry, like a suckling baby, and the next, agonisingly slow.
“She’s Cheyne–Stoking”, the nurse explains. “It shouldn’t be long now.”
Elise had always thought that she would know what to do when this final, much anticipated moment came; that her body would be guided by some primal urge or some involuntary spinal reflex. But nothing happens.
So instead she does what she thinks she should do. She finds a cold hand among the sheets and she caresses her mother’s furrowed forehead. And she wonders at the unexpected softness of her mother’s hair, which is almost but not quite as soft as her daughter Bella’s feathery curls.
She really must be dying, Elise thinks, because she would never tolerate such sentimentality if she were alive.