Hospitals

Hospitals fill me with dread, because they smell of dettol and misery and death.  However,  they are also positively bursting with hope and courage and love and new babies and concerned parents and hot clingy children and they, almost more than anywhere else I can think of offer you an extraordinary glimpse into tiny pockets of life in all it’s extraordinariness.  I suppose that is why there are so many soap operas using hospitals as a back drop to cover every storyline imaginable.  I spent most of the day looking traumatised by all the in-patients and marvelling at how so many amazing people can actually want to spend their day working in such a strange environment. 

 I received a phone call from her school at about midday.  My daughter had apparently had a “mishap” in the school playground.  Why do they say “mishap?” leaving you in this momentary A – Z of surreal scanning – from visualising your child with no head to a small scratch on the knee, with several in between.  Anyway, no big deal, she’s injured her thumb, but they feel I should take her to hospital “just in case”.  “Just in case” has to be weighed up fairly carefully in my mind.  It means rearranging my whole day and cancelling one of my classes.  I pick her up.  I know she’s fine.  Call it a mother’s instinct.  She cannot move her thumb, but there is no swelling and she’s far too delighted about life in general to have a serious injury.  I get her to wriggle her thumb, but predictably it won’t move.  Not in the slightest.  She thinks it’s broken and she definately needs a plaster cast, in her opinion.  How many parents at this point think “oh, bollocks to this, I know you’re fine and if I could leave you at school I would, but I can’t because social services will arrest me and all the mother’s will talk about me, so we’re just going to go home and you can sit on the sofa”.  My mother did that to me once.  She was called to my school because I had been sick in the loo.  On her arrival, she took one look at me, marched me into the offending cubicle and checked the surfaces.  She then decided that I was lying, (which I was, but that was hardly the point,) informed the teacher of her opinion and had me sent back to the classroom, utterly humiliated.  This traumatic flashback meant that ignoring the possibility that I could be wrong was clearly not an option.  I don’t want to humiliate her, or let her think that I don’t believe her and I certainly don’t want her to blame me for her future failure in life (which she will anyway), should she develop arthritis or a deformed thumb or worse still no thumb at all because it has dropped off owing to lack of blood circulation thanks to a negligent mother.

So we spend the entire afternoon at the hospital, having x-rays and trying not to stare at people and drinking hideous tea from polystyrene cups and eating cold ,slightly old chocolate from a machine and wishing somebody would come in and give all the surfaces a bloody good clean and generally, no doubt in the entire process of breathing and touching things, we also pick up all sorts of other hideous bacteria.  But at the end of a gruelling three hour investigation, guess what?  She was absolutely fine.