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TALES OF AN ORANGEPEELER

an archive of pleasures, wounds, sublimations
& other curiosities :: profile


06.30.22


After my CT scan I am sent back to the waiting room. I write yesterday's entry, read my book, observe people. Finally I give up and ask for a pen from the registration clerk and mention that I'm hungry. Could he give me directions to the canteen? He asks for my name and looks it up in the system and says there's a trolley for me in the Casualty ward, which is crowded, the walls lined with occupied trollies. I receive my first round of steroid, antibiotic, and paracetamol shots. While eating my first meal, the ENT doc tells me that my CT scan shows a lot of inflammation but no "collection" of pus, so no lancing (shudder, what a medieval word!) required. Whew!

I am moved to a bed in a corridor in a ward that has nothing to do with my ailment. I am lucky. The recent covid surge has heightened already high waiting room times and impacted bed availability. Rooms are reserved for older women. I am the youngest patient in the ward. To the dinner lady with the tattoo sleeves, I am "the woman in the corridor".

//

Wednesday passes swiftly, in meals, shots, reading, note-taking. Shortly after the last shot, the lights go out. At the other end of an otherwise quiet corridor, an old woman, 100 years old she says, raises her voice and berates the staff. I am not the only one in a corridor bed.

She says she is starving and asks where is Tony and she wants rice and why are you in my house. After she roars Bitch at a nurse, they try to give her milk containing sedative. She is suspicious: I'm not drinking that, she says, and dumps it on the floor. Then the nurse says she has missed a pill. Scoffs the old woman, I know each one I've taken. Eventually she takes the sedative; her voice trails off, and I fall asleep maybe around 2 am, until I wake up at 5 pm, stirred by her renewed roaring.

//

After I get up this morning, I put on makeup quickly, surreptitiously, before what seems the only bathroom mirror in the entire hospital: concealer under the eyes, eyebrow powder, the subtlest eyeliner flick. I remember the petite woman walking down the crowded corridor in Casualty yesterday, wielding files in the slinkiest grey jumpsuit and high-heeled leopard-print ankle boots, cat-eye flick and salon-blown hair. Astonishing: an immaculate runway model catwalking through a warzone.

After I woke up, I had a strong desire to leave the hospital, temporarily of course. No one would stop me. My ailment is after all above shoulder. Stroll into town. Check out exhibitions in the art gallery. Browse a bookshop. Sip an oat milk flat white in Heart's Desire (what a lovely name for a cafe). But the desire ebbs with the welter of doc visits, drips, pills, meals, and enquiries. The day's victory is being able to fit toast between my teeth.

In my corridor bed, I overhear observations by concerned staff over the latest disasters. One woman had fallen unnoticed for a minute because we're understaffed, one clucks. For example, there were only 2 doctors working the night shift in the ED on Tuesday. Thanks to a government that underfunds its hospital system yet sells off its resources to MNCs and refuses to raise corporation tax.

//

I don't remember the names of my carers. Always a different one at my bedside. One, a South Asian woman, inquires if I'm a writer. What? "The books." My diary, open. The notebook, also open. The uncapped blue biro taken off the registration clerk. Some other kind of medicine, I guess. Tethers to a life that feels a lifetime ago, even though it was only a few days ago.

Time is funny here. A visit from the husband passes too quickly. I've become institutionalised, stripped of rings and wallets and day clothes, identifiers from a distant past, now passively surrendered to my schedule of IVs and meals and examinations. Deprivations no longer feel like indignities.

//

Jazz musician Eric Dolphy's postcard to George Russell, 1961:

Trying to play
The New Concept
with a outward
bound feeling

He died 3 years later, on the 29th of June 1964 at age 36. I listen to his "Hat and Beard" on my phone without headphones (I have none, but it doesn't matter, soaps and game shows blare out of rooms every minute). I listen, trying to catch that "outward bound feeling".

Later I want to play Diamanda Galas, but her elemental vocals, so suited to tragedy, are probably inappropriate for a hospital corridor. I feel, however, her visceral rage at state institutions failing, instinctively, to care for the people under their governance. The State does not love you.

//

Thanks for all your good wishes, fellow D-landers. So very much appreciated! I am improving and I hope to leave by this weekend. Fingers crossed. Xx




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