Yellows, Greens and Browns

There was something about your first stethoscope.

It was pink. It made people smile, it told them you were safe.

You were quirky.

It made you feel you wouldn’t have to tell people in work you were gay

because you weren’t ready to have those parts of your life collide

by even having them simultaneously in your mouth.

It looked like a cartoon accessory against the backdrop of blue.

All the hospital is blue, simultaneously calming and horrifying.

Blue nurses’ tunics, scrubs, curtains, gowns, swabs.

A tiny blue tablet to help you sleep for the first week because

the GP was worried you were going too fast.

Your job was to be in contact with a lot of blood.

Taking it, transporting it, matching it, transfusing it.

Your hand would be in contact with blood at last a few dozen times per day.

It would trickle down your wrist as you put in drip needles and

as you would hold your hand over bleeding wounds.

You remember a comfort in knowing that you were no different

to the patient, even though they would always stare, almost aggressively,

when they interacted with you as if to say

‘don’t leave me, don’t let me die, I can’t do this.’

All blood is the same colour of red.

You learn to smell colour.

You can see a picture in a textbook,

or an operation through glass,

or even when a patient shows you a part of their body

but the air doesn’t move to your face as fast as your

brain can unarchive a well-worn memory.

The greens and yellows and browns no longer remind you

of grass and lemon and chocolate,

but of smells you can’t describe but your family can ‘only imagine.’

Over time you become desensitised.

Your shoulders drop.

People start to see you relax into things.

But you still go home to an empty house;

it seems you’ve accidentally chosen your career over a partner.

People die; you cry because you find out that they

asked for you before they passed,

and you had avoided saying goodbye

because you thought it wasn’t your place.

You stop crying at all. More blue. Mottled, dead skin.

Blue solution used to clean the bodies.

Blue is not red, or yellow. It’s not brown or green.

It’s not part of the body, other than in the eye, so it feels safe.

It’s why they use it in tampon adverts I’m told.

You complete your post-graduate programme and can start to specialise.

You choose psychiatry and get to wear your own clothes.

You wear all black, all the time, and have done for 10 years.

Colour is too important to you to deviate from this,

because you don’t know what it will stir up in you and your patients.

You are blank, and you absorb pain and trauma

as the black pavement soaks up the sun.

You go home hot and saturated with only sleep

and drive-through to replenish you.

Colour begins to drain from cinema, theatre and food.

Your lifeblood. Your refreshment and revival.

Things are on top of you and you’re sinking in shame.

The red is so vibrant and dense

that you feel you need to keep your eyes closed;

everywhere you look red is used to point out that things are bad.

Your diary is full of overdue appointments flagged,

the management spreadsheets are more red than green,

the faces of the exasperated family and friends who just want you to stop.

The red wasn’t clear to you, your psychoanalyst whispered,

because it was a common colour,

or because it was the colour of panic or danger.

It was because it was the colour of the blood that you had identified

a decade before as the very simplest thing that made you anonymous.

Another ‘bozo on the bus.’ You stopped. You stopped for a long time.

You saw your patients in the supermarket and felt guilty that

they looked sicker, but that everyone you met told you that you

were the healthiest you’d ever looked.

You went to the park every day for a year.

You would spend hours looking at the hydrangeas and daffodils and ducks.

It became about finding joy in colour again.

Avocado and scrambled eggs on wheaten bread in the garden.

Green tea with a golden dog in your lap reading an old leather book.

The court and ball, and a game of tennis with some dirty old trainers.

The green eyes, blonde hair and brown glasses,

of your husband as he greets you from work each day.

Greens and yellows and browns.