glued together

It’s a turbulent business being a parent, even when your children are getting older. It can throw you up against unfamiliar circumstances and make you think about things that matter.

When anyone in the family has a sore throat these days, the result is a covid test and then relief if it’s negative. But you can’t relax, not really.

On Monday my teenage son’s sore throat and headache got rapidly worse and the glands in his neck became swollen and hard. Back when he was four, a sore throat became an infected lymph gland and he was admitted to the children’s ward for four days. When I felt that gland and its sudden swelling on Monday afternoon and couldn’t get in to see a doctor, we went straight to Accident & Emergency.

It might seem gender-biased but you expect to end up there occasionally with men in the family. A woman in our community once accompanied her son to A&E in an ambulance when he took a wrong turn off the trampoline, and was asked by the paramedic whether she’d ever been to A&E with her son before. She replied no. ‘Better get used to it,’ he told her with a grin. Good advice. I’ve been several times, with son and husband. They specialize in bits of metal stuck in eyeballs.

 Whenever I’m in the waiting room in A&E I always wish that politicians had to visit more often with their children. Not that I’d wish ill on their children but A&E is a great leveller and it would show the politicians who’ve only ever breathed rarefied air what normal people have to put up with. Our most private and vulnerable moments being shared publicly, within earshot of strangers, separated only by a pleated curtain.

As S lay on a bed in A&E we turned a deaf ear to the private gynaecological difficulties of the woman in the next cubicle.

This forced exposure is offset by the epic grace of the people who work in A&E, whose humanity is what makes hospital bearable.

S was very sick with tonsillitis. The doctor described his tonsils as full of pus and so swollen they were almost touching. As he shook with fever and croaked and gulped down water when they numbed his throat and then threw it all up again, they watched him more closely, bumped him up the queue and found him a bed for overnight observation.

After intravenous antibiotics, painkillers and steroids and a bag of saline, he quickly regained ground. When he could eat again and keep it down, they provided sandwiches and ice cream and orange juice. They offered me coffee and tea, and found me a chair that was almost but not quite comfortable. ‘Lucky to have this, actually, it’s a rarity,’ said the nurse who tracked it down for me.

As we kept each other company, me with the egg sandwiches and he with the rest, relaxing with relief, we became aware again of the journeys of our fellow in-patients. The elderly woman with dementia across the way, unaccompanied by anyone and at a complete loss to understand what was happening to her. Two nurses and one doctor with saintly patience persuaded her to accept a catheter. Imagine such a procedure when you have no understanding of what’s happening. ‘You dirty bastards, how would you like it if I did that to you?’ she asked. In the morning, she was peacefully asleep when I returned, tucked in, secure and cared for, by the kindness and skill of strangers.

I didn’t stay overnight in that almost comfortable chair as I would have been in an unfit state for the long drive home the next day. Instead I booked into the hotel over the road. It used to be the hospital and was repurposed as deluxe apartments and hotels rooms when the new one was built. I booked a room online and once S was comfortable and ready for sleep, I went across the road looking forward to the comfort of my ‘king-suite’ and free toiletries.

Oh, the folly of expecting accuracy from an online booking. The bed was king sized but the room wasn’t. The bathroom was en-suite but the ‘free toiletries’ were two pump bottles nailed to the wall. The thing I really wanted was a means of brushing my teeth but there wasn’t one and I had forgotten to ask at reception. I drank a cup of chamomile tea and turned in, thankful for a flat, comfortable bed. Two days later I found an email in my unchecked account. ‘We do have dental packs at reception, just remember to ask when you book in.’ More kindness, only I had missed it.

In the morning I enjoyed my ‘breakfast included’ and cut it short when S texted to say the morning’s nursing shift was coming in for handover. I found him recovered after a surprisingly good night’s sleep under his thin blanket. I watched him devour his own breakfast, his tinned peaches and cereal, carefully buttering and pasting honey on ‘very cold toast’, licking the knife and the inside of the plastic tub, relishing it way more than I had my costly eggs Benedict, all the while being careful of his intravenous shunt.

As the ward woke up, the lives of the other in-patients were exposed again, an audio drama playing out from behind the curtains. Directly opposite us a husband and wife occupied beds alongside each other, their love manifesting in continual small remarks and gestures. ‘R, your breakfast is there,’ she called to him. ‘Make sure you eat.’

The morning shift nurse arrived at R’s bedside and introduced herself to him.

‘My name’s A, I’m the morning nurse and I’ll be looking after you,’ she said.

‘Oh well, that’s marvellous,’ he said, his voice filled with genuine warmth.

‘Do you want your glasses?’

‘Oh yes, might as well. My other ones are better but I trod on them. I stuck them together with superglue and that worked for a while but then they fell apart again.’

The previous evening and that morning, R kept raising with anyone who would listen the question of whether his wife had long-covid. Since having it a year ago, he said, she had been ‘terribly weak’. The concern in his voice was palpable and his diction was worthy of Gielgud. ‘I’ve read an academic paper on it,’ he kept saying.

His patience, good nature and the undemanding and faultlessly polite way he addressed the strangers he found himself surrounded by became increasingly moving.

‘He’s such a gentle man, isn’t he?’ the woman in the next curtained cubicle said to a nurse.

Meanwhile, R described to nurse A some medication he took each morning. ‘I must have that tablet,’ he said, his voice more insistent but still polite.

‘What do you take that tablet for?’ she asked. To which he replied that he’d had depression some years ago due to circumstances in his life. ‘Even though I’m not depressed any more, if I don’t take it, if anything the least bit sad happens, I just burst into tears,’ he said. ‘So I must take that tablet, every day.’

This was the undoing of me and the doctor found me welling up when he arrived a moment later to check up on S. He didn’t bat an eyelid. I suspect it happens all the time.

R’s gallantry and old-fashioned manners reminded me of a lost member of my own extended family who died in hospital last year. Then I thought of another who died at home holding hands with a lifelong companion. I thought of the members of my extended family who died in hospital during the turbulence of covid, cared for by strangers in hazmat suits. I’m not over the grief of any of it and have come to think we carry grief around with us like a lifelong companion. It swills around us, a great miasma, sometimes a thin and distant cloud and sometimes a suffocating one. I don’t think I’m alone in feeling lost or afraid in it sometimes.

S was discharged from hospital and we drove home that day, a long and welcome drive up the valley. He was told to take it easy but inevitably became bored at home and went out to hang with his mates and infect his girlfriend a day or two later, buoyed up by antibiotics. How the youth bounce back.

I went back to work but those anonymous people we encountered beyond the curtains stayed with me and made me think of the rooms we inhabit and the places we fade and return to life again. Hospitals, hotels and home. What they promise and what we experience in them, those places where we live out our most vulnerable and sometimes joyful moments. Glued together until we fall apart again.