A Landscape of Ill health

I never thought I would write a blog like this.

This one is very personal, although the landscape of ill health must be an environment which has been familiar to many of us at one time or another. Whether it’s man ‘flu, measles , or malaria, the landscape of ill health is the context in which you start feeling ill, seek help, sweat it and, hopefully, start to recuperate and/or adapt your lifestyle to make management easier.

I can understand if you don’t want to read this blog - it’s a strange and sensitive topic - but I felt I needed to record where I had been, during a recent bout of ‘ill health’ and what, if anything, had helped me along the way.

The journey started in the floriferous garden of a friend. Already strange pains were running around my insides and I didn’t have the energy to wander around the abundant and colourful beds, but sat in the sun soaking up the ambience. We left after an hour and went home. By 8pm, we were in A&E.

The entrance to this particular A&E isn’t easy to find but the hospital has painted the most visible outside wall a bright, bright shade of red with the word ‘EMERGENCY’ painted across it in white. It works. It is cheerful, simple, informative and actually makes you feel rather important.

Inside, the waiting area is high-ceilinged, a cross between a modern church and a barn, with serried ranks of chairs drawn up below. I could see no pictures on the wall, or few helpful notices, apart from an electronic information board presenting ghastly statistics on how long your wait was likely to be. Hell probaby has boards like that (‘five hours to the boiling oil cauldron’) and the uplift from the red wall outside vanished immediately.

The waiting area chairs are unappealing, too, with their straight lines, which does nothing to make the intermittent scatter of uncomfortable people look more homely. There are as many, sometimes more, healthy companions as would-be patients, so it’s difficult to gauge the actual numbers. The worst aspect of the chairs is the occasional armrests which make it impossible to lie down. I assessed the floor. No, I would just fidget, moan and wander around.

Across the floor lies reception and the nurses’ station, with security guard sitting at the back. The nurses are efficient, competent and understanding. It looks professional and, most of the time, unintimidating. A real boost to the patient. Every time I took a pain relief amble, I was immediately asked if I was ‘all right’ (I knew what they meant) and then they reassured me that I was first on the list for triage. I appreciated this, of course, but there is no information on how long the patient in front of you will take to pass through the exit doors of triage heaven.

Just as I was thinking that I could stand the wait no longer, my name was called. As I stood, I noticed another couple had also got up and would get to the Triage door before me. They slipped through and the door slammed in my face. Pathetically I knocked and hoped for reinforcements, but finally the door reopened and the ‘other’ couple were politely ushered out. We were in!

The triage room was large and clinical, which was fine, although I felt as if I were being auditioned rather than assessed. Next call was a blood test and we passed into the medical back-of-house to start on another, and hopefully therapeutic, journey. This area reminded me of an Arab Souk or a medieval market, with small booths for particular specialists or purposes and other areas where people, desks and equipment spilled out into the main market place. This layout seems to have served humanity well for hundreds of years.

We progressed further to ‘find me a bed’, which turned out to be a consulting room couch in a small space with a glass front wall. Here I was put on a drip and plugged into a bag of painkiller. A sensible doctor arrived and so, eventually, did a couple of boxes of useful looking pills.

We were discharged around midnight and struggled to find our way out of the medical souk, locate an exit door and, finally, find the car. The car park cost us £5; this would have been free in Wales or Scotland. We could afford to pay, but even in my befuddled state I felt that others might consider this a real hardship. Yet without that car park revenue stream, the Welsh Health Service seems to be doing as well, if not better than the English. Has England missed something?

Just before 2 am, we were back. Sadly, nothing had changed - for me or the hospital - except that there were fewer patients by then and a shorter triage queue. There was a wrangle about whether I needed another blood test. No-one took a decision so we carried on anyway, to find a ‘bed’. This cublicle was even smaller - like a very down-sized version of a French Formula 1 hotel (or, possibly, a cell). Space for just a ‘bed’ and a chair, with toilet ‘across the hall’.

Between fitful bouts of sleep, we made room for another drip (water - thank godness - and an anti-sickness drug) plus a couple of codeine pills for good measure. By 5 am nothing much seemed to be happening so we decided it was time to get out. It was mentioned that this might not be a good idea. ‘You haven’t been formally discharged’. We looked at each other. An Anglo Saxon expletive hovered, unspoken, in the air. A form was signed. We were going home. And, once we found a ‘way out’ sign, we were going in the car, parked in an ‘unofficial’ but free space.

Once home, the landscape becomes comfortably familar, but limited. From my bed, I can’t see out of any of the windows. The ceiling is less than stimulating and not even the geraniums on the wall can inspire any kind of emotion. Rumpled bed sheets aren’t attractive either but for the first twenty four hours I am mostly asleep and don’t care. From then on it’s the solace of home which matters.

The bathroom is still ‘across the hall’ but there are only two of us in the house. The bed gets made, the floors are hoovered.

Although I may not have cared about the bedsheets, I was disturbed by a new landscape, which now accompanied me, created entirely within my slightly delirious head. If I closed my eyes, a collage of beautifully formed images emerged - buildings, views, people, letter boxes, cats - there was no end to the show. As I lapsed slowly into sleep my brain told me stories so real that I raised a hand to take a pen or open a box. Only to find the images were not there. Then to find that my hand never actually moved either. What had triggered in my brain to take this extraordinary action? Although not threatening, I was glad to wake today with only an external landscape to navigate.

Finally, I was booked for a scan at the local surgery. The ambience in the waiting room feels much more communal. The ceiling is lower but not claustrophic. The chairs break ranks and curve around and across the room. There are lots of relevant and friendly notices and posters which creates a positive vibe. People come and go, creating life and movement. Looking at an annoucement that three practices are now working in a group, we were struck by how this reflects wooded Surrey; the key words in each surgery’s name are ‘Woodlands’, ‘Hawthorns’ and ‘Holmhurst’. But best of all, the large plate glass window lets in the sun and I can see the nodding heads of ornamental grasses, blowing in the wind, just outside.

Shall I go back to bed? No, I think I feel strong enough to watch a little television and look out of the window.