Close Encounters of the Human Kind

Boxing Day night, 1988, I teetered, zombie grey and matchstick thin, through the automatic doors of an almost deserted A&E. The receptionist looked up.

“Get that man a wheelchair.”

I looked over my shoulder for the poor unfortunate.

Whilst being wheeled to a private room, I overheard the whispered confidence “He’s seriously ill”.

The next morning, I shuffled, hospital gowned and leading my drip stand dog, to the shower by the nurse’s station. Through a window, I saw a premature, solitary snowdrop, braving the snow.

I sang “We gotta get outa this place” in the shower, and when I left the room, the nurses stood and applauded me, whether for my passionate performance or the sentiment, I never knew. One nurse stepped forward and took my arm in support, “The Animals, 1965, Eric Burdon,” she said.

A revolving door of hospital stays: a reliance on transfusions and infusions.

An unrecognised reliance on that pretty, young nurse; crisp blue uniform, white apron and cap, upside down watch, name badge “Julie” who used to sit with me in the quiet of the night and calmly, reassuringly, explain hopes, complications, and ramifications of treatment.

A friendly familiarity, a cheek kissed in greeting or a squeeze of the hand when she changed my drip. The nights were easier when Julie was on shift to field my fears, and earth my drug-induced euphoria.

Pillow propped, I drowsed in the dim light of my bedside lamp, interpreting the sounds of a night-time ward. Julie came in and sat on the bed. She put her arms around me, a cwtch probably not in the handbook, but all the more therapeutic for the infraction.

“Keith, you can’t go on like this.”