Confirmation
The first sign was my evening meal being handed to me via an arm extended around the door. Up until then, my meals in the isolation ward had been brought to my bedside. Even before the official confirmation, at that point, I knew.
I had been admitted to St Thomas’ hospital on Saturday 21st March, having been taken ill on Victoria station. I was shivering, and had vomited. I was pretty certain it was Coronavirus. I had never felt ill like this before.
The virus had been a topic of conversation for several weeks now, particularly at St Saviours, my Church, where initially the congregation had been advised we should no longer “share the peace” by shaking hands with those around us. Nor should we practice intinction (dipping the host into the challis) during the sharing of bread and wine. A week or two later, the wine was withdrawn altogether. It seemed rather piffling, and I suspect like most others I was waiting like Sean of the Dead “for this to all blow over”. Now though, the church was about to be shut down, as was the day centre and night shelter I frequented. Instead of wafting into oblivion, it appeared the mythical virus had blown its way into my own body.
It took 24 hours in the isolation ward for that to be confirmed. I and my bed were transferred to Alexandra, newly designated as a Covid ward, probably because its beds were arranged into units of four, separated from the corridor and nurses station by walls, and a set of double doors. Shirley Temple’s On the good ship Lollipop was playing on a loop in my fevered head, the word good replaced by the word plague.
I was the second of the four to arrive, T. and then B. appearing within 24 hours. N. was already there. As, initially, was R.. He, though, wasn’t there long.
Tuesday
B., T. and I have bonded, and talk regularly to each other. It was T. who initiated our chat, on the second afternoon. Out of pure boredom I think, I could see how difficult he was finding it, nothing to do, away from his family. Noisy N. in the bed next to him.
N. is very elderly, well beyond 80 probably, and in the advanced stages of dementia. He talks to himself constantly, and loudly. In truth, he is not talking to himself, he is talking to people only he can see, people from his past, and his recent present. It is like listening to someone making a loud phone call, to half a dozen people at once, which rambles on for hours, and uses no consistent logic, volume control, or indeed, a phone.
“Will you help us? Michael? Please help us! That man came in. It isn’t fixed properly! I can’t… lift it! Can you fix… that panel? On the left. Eh? Please, help us!” It is both heart-breaking, and extremely annoying.
***
The ward is on the 9th floor, and both my bed and N.’s sit by the big window facing east over the Thames. After a couple of days, when I feel well enough to get out of bed, I sit in my bedside chair and look out, over the hospital gardens and fountain, Westminster Bridge, the London Eye, Charing Cross station, and the river. There are clearly fewer people around, but they are there. In the gardens they sit in scrubs on the benches around the fountain. People cross the bridge on bikes. Women in their 20s jog over the bridge, or along the river, ponytails bouncing. There are buses a-plenty, and regular Thames Clippers, docking at Westminster pier for several minutes, before continuing. Life crawls along. Behind the glass, I feel strangely safe, cocooned, and in on a big secret the outside world has yet to understand. This is serious.
***
A lot of our chat involves what T. describes as “putting the world to rights”. Mostly this is about politics. It may seem like dodgy ground on which to further an allegiance, but it’s the allegiance, not the politics, that is the primary focus in our discussions. Politics, for all three of us, is about connection. It’s about the things that pull us together. It’s how we can talk about politics and yet stay connected. Because we realise early on, the only way we can come through times like this is together.
***
I only have a cheap, non-internet phone, on which the credit is about to run out. I manage to send two final texts, one to my Mother, and one to my best friend, explaining that I will no longer be able to phone or text, and would really appreciate a call. Later I get texts from both, asking how I am. Clearly they have either not properly read, or understood, my messages.
Unable to communicate I feel increasingly isolated and frantic. I want to ask either T. or B. if I can borrow their mobiles, but don’t feel I know them well enough yet. Plus, I feel a bit pathetic in my situation, a 56 year old man without even the nous to top up his own mobile. I don’t feel 56. I feel like a child. Eventually though, worrying about my mother worrying about me, I pluck up the courage to ask T. if I can borrow his phone, explaining my predicament. He is, of course, fine with it, although unable to show me how to work the mobile. “It belongs to the missus,” he tells me “I don’t do technology.”
I’m not a user of iPhones, which this is, but there is an immediate problem I can’t get round – a PIN code that T. doesn’t know and I am unable to guess. I hand the phone back. B. has spotted my trouble though and lends me his.
“Calls are free, they come with the package,” he tells me.
I ring Mum. It’s good to talk to her, but the line is poor, and I’m conscious I’m using someone else’s phone (even if the calls are free). I ask Mum to call me back on my mobile.
Mum rings about ten minutes later. I talk about St Saviours, and how I miss it. The community. The people. I get emotional, and a couple of times I have to stop talking, and breathe deeply to stem the tears. The virus has made me physically weak, and physically weak, my emotions run rife. Later I am on my bed, and I remember a couple of my favourite scenes from The Simpsons, randomly, and I find myself laughing quietly to myself. I have to hide it, I must look mad, laughing with no context. Shirley is nudged aside, and Whitney Houston’s I get so emotional lodges itself in my head for the rest of the day.
***
T. is not kidding when he says he doesn’t do technology. When his mobile rings, he flails at the green answer button with his finger, flicking extravagantly to the side. It rarely works. So I go over, and either answer it for him, or if I’m not there in time, will phone the person back, and hand T. the phone. To be fair, it’s a complicated phone that I find hard to work out myself, but I can do the basics on it, and that’s enough. You quickly learn to care about the others in the ward, who are all in the same boat, and it’s good to see T. chatting to his family. He is lost without them. I hope he’s back with them soon.
***
We talk about dramas that mirror the strange world in which we find ourselves.
Day of the Triffids is one that B. and T. talk about. I don’t know that one so well, maybe it’s a generational thing? Both of them are old enough to be my father (while I myself am old enough to be a Grandparent). I talk about 28 Days Later. B. makes a note of it for future watching. I wonder if it was from this very hospital that Cillian Murphy stumbled, across Westminster Bridge, into an utterly changed world?
I am most reminded though of The Survivors, a TV series from the 1970s, featuring a world populated by the survivors of a plague. Neither B. nor T. remembers this, though I am gratified when at the end of the week a friend texts me to say he is watching re-runs of it.
***
Prince Charles has the virus!
The news is relayed to us by a young nurse, doing the obs and meds in the early evening.
“Probably going to be ok with the self isolating,” I observe, rather unoriginally. There is a sense though that shit just got real. The virus is sweeping through the population of the world, and no-one is safe. Prince Charles is 71. In the vulnerable category, but probably healthy enough that he will be fine. They will clearly be anxious about the Queen though. I start to wonder where this all ends. How many will be infected? How many will die? And how will we all react? Things can surely never be the same again.
***
As the only one on the ward who is not confined to bed through oxygen dependency or dementia I have become the ward’s Mr Fixit. I help T. with his phone, not just answering it, but charging it, and bring the walker to him when required. I retrieve B.’s wallet that he dropped under his bed. And I wrangle N.
N.is constantly trying to get out of bed, to perform some unidentified task from some other point in his life. He doesn’t realise he’s in hospital during the coronavirus of 2020. So I press the button to call the nursing staff and while they put on their PPE I stand by N.’s bed, talking to him, persuading him to stay where he is, assuring him that help is on the way.
***
T., who is now mobile enough to be able to use the toilet situated 10 feet from the exit of the bay, has been given a face mask to wear when he does so. It’s a complicated affair, with two sets of strings which are both tied round the back of the head, completely obscured from the line of vision. He manages to get the bottom set done, but the top set is beyond him. He asks me for help.
I go over to his bed, and he bows his head so I can better tie the strings. His hair is wispy, salt and pepper, accentuating his frailty. It’s a strange situation to find myself in, assisting an elderly man, a stranger, in this way. It feels invasive, uncomfortable, but also gentle, and something more. A privilege. I realise this is what nurses, care workers - an unseen army of people out in the world - do every day. It’s a glimpse into that world, no more, but it’s enough to feel an enormous sense of humility - and to know that it is not something that I could do.
It’s a huge cliché to say it, but it’s a cliché that bears repeating until the situation is redressed. Those for whom this is a calling deserve so much more than what our society continues to get away with giving them. And society gets away with it because those who do this service would actually do it for nothing. If our actions demonstrate what we believe it means to be human, then there are some people whose actions highlight the shortcomings of the rest of us. Inevitably, that makes us uncomfortable.
***
Life is slow on the ward, and with no TV, radio, newspapers or even an internet phone, incredibly tedious. I find myself hanging on for the next ‘event’, which is the arrival of a meal (generally 8am, 12:30pm and 5:30pm) and the rounds of obs and meds.
A bell, out by the entrance to the staff area, signals the arrival of the meals. It might not make me salivate, but on hearing it I arrange space on my bedside tray, and focus my mind on waiting. It’s not just the assuaging of hunger I am anticipating, it’s the action; having something to do. It probably takes ten minutes to eat the food, then life becomes about waiting for the next meal. The next entertainment. And so it goes, day upon day.
I am never sure what meds I am getting when. As far as I’m aware, I’m on a combination of vitamins, tablets for my hiatus hernia, antibiotics and, where necessary, paracetamol. Nothing for Covid. As a doctor pointed out to me when I asked, there is no treatment for the virus, it hasn’t been developed yet. The meds are to treat the symptoms, and any secondary conditions for which treatment is already available. Meds are administered at different levels at different times. I enjoy it most when there are a lot to take in one go, it’s akin to devouring a substantial meal. Psychologically at least.
Obs – observations - happen probably half a dozen times a day, and involve taking blood pressure, pulse rate and oxygen saturation levels via a sensor on the finger, and temperature, which is taken by inserting an electronic thermometer into the ear. They don’t last long, but the gripping and the poking feel like being groomed briefly, attention focused for a short moment on me. It feels almost sensual.
That’s how small life has become.
***
As I mentioned earlier, when I first arrived on the ward the bed space now inhabited by B. had been occupied by R., a calm man of about the same age as me. We were polite to each other in the brief time we were ward-mates without ever really bonding, but he was watching The thick of it on his iPhone, which gave me a sense of kinship.
R. was clearly ill, he was lucid but he would cough regularly, and they were deep, dry coughs. He was in the early stages of pneumonia which, I quickly learned, was the thing the medical staff most feared. Early Monday morning, he was visited by a phalanx of medics, lead by a doctor from the intensive care ward – the ICU. It was explained that he would be moved there and hooked up to a ventilator. This was important, they told him, as they were lucky enough to have caught the pneumonia in the early stages, and in the ICU they would be able to give him the best care possible. They would come back in half an hour to transfer him to the ward. Thus he had 30 minutes to let his family know what had happened. Disconcerting enough, but half an hour later things began to get deeply troubling.
One of the doctors came back, and explained to R. that the unit from ICU was outside. They would be rendering him unconscious and he would then be placed in a medically induced coma, and hooked up to life support. He would no longer be breathing for himself, the ventilator would be doing that for him. Although the curtains were drawn around R.’s bed, both of us had the same reaction: this was not what we had understood from the earlier conversation.
“Sorry, this was explained. I thought you’d understood,” said the doctor. Neither R. nor myself had indeed understood, or even remembered this being explained.
“How long will I be in the coma?” R. asked.
“It’s impossible to say. It depends on how the body responds, but anything from 2 to 3 days, to 3 to 4 weeks.”
R. now had 10 minutes to inform those who mattered to him (essentially his partner, who was stuck, cruelly, in another country) that he was about to be placed on life support, before a small army of doctors, wheeling in stern looking equipment, and each with their own roles to perform with military efficiency, swept in and within 10 minutes completely changed his life. Outside the curtain, I saw nothing but bulges, and glimpses of light footwear , but I heard it all, before the team were going through final checks, congratulating each other on a job well done, and R. was swept from my reality forever. I was left stunned by what I had just witnessed, and troubled by the idea that none of this seemed to have been properly explained. I had to spend a few hours sifting through it to put it in a narrative that helped me cope. The following is all I could come up with.
Doctors are kings on the wards. They are making huge decisions constantly, and literally have the power of life and death. Some operate judiciously and inclusively, some don’t. But operating from such a lofty situation it may be all too easy to lose touch with the impact their decisions have. Maybe it’s even crucial; emotion and empathy must make the job uncomfortably difficult. It’s an impossible situation over which to really develop an opinion. All I can say, listening to the drama unfolding behind curtains six feet from me, the shocking speed at which things can change, coupled with the miscommunication of essential information – however that may have transpired – was frightening. And I wasn’t even the person to whom it was happening.
Wednesday
The doctors are investigating the theory that developing the virus is accompanied by a loss of the sense of taste and smell. T. could definitely concur, he is off his food at the moment as it has no taste. T. is a man who does the cooking for his family. He is looking forward to getting home and roasting a pork belly he has in the freezer.
“That’s it then,” I say “We all have a date. Sunday lunch at T.’s; we’ll all come round for pork belly.” Later, when T.’s sense of taste and subsequently appetite begins to return, we talk about how we will ring each other when we are home. “And when I speak to you, T.,” I tell him “I want to smell the pork belly over the phone.” It’s a way to keep us focused on normality, and remind us that soon, life will get back to how it used to be. In truth of course, the whole world will never be quite the same again.
***
During my first night on the ward the fever gave me vivid, hallucinatory dreams. In them, the four bed ward became like a first world war field hospital. I complained that there was a man, wrapped in blankets, lying beside my bed. I was told he had the virus. He was holding a baby. There were a dozen people crammed into the room. I overheard that N. had been sectioned. And in the bed on the diagonal from mine, there was a very poorly casualty indeed, with a young, female doctor in accompaniment, talking gravely, non-stop to the nurses about oxygen, and drips. This last part was true, it was actually the arrival of T. “The most ill person I have seen so far,” one of the nurses tells us later, when it looks like T. might soon be going home.
***
In the late afternoon, a doctor comes and installs what looks like a small radio on the side of N.’s bed, and attaches it via a magnet and a red cord to a clip on his hospital gown. After not very long at all, N. attempts to leave his bed. This pulls the ‘magnet’ from the ‘radio’, which breaks a circuit, and sets off an alarm, far louder than the nurse call alarm, louder than the emergency crash team alarm, louder even than the trumpet that summons the legions from Hades, probably. The doctor comes back in the room, re-connects the alarm, and settles N. back down. I look suspiciously at this set-up. I perceive a new world of pain.
This begins following the change of nursing shift at 8pm. The alarm goes off again. It is quite extraordinarily loud and it is impossible to focus on anything else. This time there is no doctor who knows what to do and because the hand over is still going on it is five minutes before a nurse arrives. When she does, it becomes clear quite rapidly that she has not encountered the alarm before, and does not know how to turn it off. She signals for someone outside the room to come and assist her, and begins to attend to N. while the alarm continues to shriek urgently. T. and I look at each other, shaking our heads. The atmosphere turns mutinous.
It seems like 15 or 20 minutes before the lead nurse arrives, and at last the alarm is silenced. All three of us, T. B. and I, demand that the alarm is removed.
“It’s pointless,” I exclaim “It’s not going to stop him getting out of bed, it’s just going to go off regularly during the night and mean no-one is going to get any sleep.” The rather unfairly besieged nurse explains patiently that the alarm was the decision of “the Trust” and none of the staff have any authority to change it. It also transpires that she is the only staff member who knows how to operate it, and the only way others will learn is if it goes off while they are in attendance and she comes and shows them how to deal with it.
Safe to say we are all fuming, but probably none more so than me. It’s not helped by the fact that I can’t think of any better solution. For N., being out of bed is dangerous, I don’t know at what point he caught the virus but he has also had a fall, is sporting 2 black eyes, and is incredibly frail.
I am still fuming when the nurse comes over to do my meds. I force myself to be respectful, and thank her for her care as I usually do. It’s not her fault. It’s nobody’s ‘fault’. The whole situation is miserable and unprecedented, and everyone is just feeling their way.
***
I don’t hear N.’s alarm again though. The next morning he is deeply asleep, so much so that the nurses are unable to feed him his breakfast, and the doctors get nothing out of him when doing their rounds. Later in the morning, I notice a dressing on the left side of his forehead. I struggle to remember if it was there before. I mention it to B., he can’t remember either. Did he have another fall in the night? (In which case, did we all sleep through the alarm?)
N.’s unresponsiveness is worrying, but it’s also a welcome respite from the loud conversations he perpetually had with the ghosts of his past, and it also means that the day passes without the alarm going off. Occasionally he shifts in his bed, and he wakes groggily to be fed a bit of lunch, but is soon unconscious again. I stare across at him regularly. He looks peaceful, his face younger. I wonder if he is about to make that last journey, out of consciousness, across the Styx. At least it will be a peaceful end.
***
The sun has been shining all week, and the view from the ward over the Thames is spectacular. The sky every day seems clear blue, and it’s only the reports from the nurses that tell us the weather is nonetheless quite cold. Despite the clear skies though, I can’t see the sun, I can only tell where it is from the shadows it casts. As it disappears, around 5:20 each evening, it leaves a sprinkle on the Thames beyond Westminster Pier, sparkling away after bouncing from something that I cannot identify the location of. Over the course of around ten minutes the dapples grow smaller in number, and fainter, until they disappear altogether, and I prepare myself for dinner.
Thursday
Early yesterday evening, T. mentioned a ham sandwich and I couldn’t get the notion out of my head. Eventually, cheekily, I asked the nurse if there was any chance. She looked dubious, but said she would see. As she went to leave, both B. and T. piped up.
“I’ll have one.”
“Make that three.”
“…or whatever there is,” I conceded, now wondering if we’d pushed it too far.
As it turns out there was only a single cardboard pack, containing two ham sandwiches. Democratically we decided that, as the first to ask, I would have one, and as the one who made the initial suggestion T. would have the other. We munched away, only slightly guiltily.
This morning, B.’s obs are a bit down. The nurse decides he should have a cup of tea, with sugar, to perk him up a bit. Immediately T. and I order one too.
“You’ll have to wait until breakfast,” says the nurse, patiently.
A few minutes later B. is sipping happily away at his tea. He eyes T. and I over the rim of the paper cup.
“This is a lovely cuppa,” he tells us, smugly. I look across at T.
“That was a fantastic ham sandwich though, wasn’t it T.?”
“Superb,” agrees T.. B. takes a big slurp, eyes twinkling
“I think this is the best cup of tea I’ve ever had.”
***
During my second, feverish night on the ward I had woken around 4:30am, annoyed to find that the ward lights on my side were on. I soon realised why. The man I later came to know as B. was on the phone to his wife. I couldn’t hear her side of the conversation but I could hear the sound of her voice, hysterical and inconsolable. B. was saying goodbye. He was on the full dose of oxygen and yet it wasn’t working, and in the evening he had been told by the doctor that he was unlikely to make it through the night. B. was calm, and sad. I wept silently in my bed, unable to quite believe once again what was unfolding less than 6 feet from where I was.
I thought about what I would say in a similar situation. I realised it could come to that. I understood B.’s calmness, that he had already come to terms with it. In a way, we all had, the very real prospect was all around us in a way it just wasn’t on the ‘outside’. I didn’t want to die. Neither did B.. But we were in a place where people died. Not everyone was going to make it out of there by any means. Again, our biggest worry; worrying about other people, worrying about us.
***
Now, though, I have come through the virus, and out the other side. I can no longer infect, or be infected. I have a superpower.
The doctor confirms that when I leave I will be one of the rare people who can go anywhere and do anything, without fear. He disappears behind the curtain with his junior doctor to attend to N. and I explain my new, rare freedoms to B.. As I do, the young doctor emerges from the curtain.
“I need to point out that you will still need to comply with Government guidance regarding movement,” he smiles. “Please don’t tell the Police that Dr Mukherjee said you can do as you please!”
***
T. suddenly grabs the walker, and takes himself off to the toilet. B. is concerned that he hasn’t taken oxygen with him. He is gone a while.
When he comes back he is in a terrible state, shaking, and gasping for air. He sits on the edge of the bed, face contorted, sweating dreadfully, waiting for everything to calm down again. After ten long minutes, it does, and he is able to swing himself back into bed. Later, when the doctors are doing their rounds, they become concerned about his heart.
T. is pushing himself too hard, in an effort to get well quickly, and get home. We all want to get home. Except, I don’t have one. I have been homeless for seven months. For 6 weeks from the end of January I had a place in a night shelter, sleeping in a sleeping bag on a camp bed in a room with 30 other guys. Now, because of the virus, the night shelter has had to close. I’m pretty sure they won’t chuck me out on the street, but equally, I can’t stay here, blocking a bed. The hospital’s homeless team are on the case, investigating a local connection I have with Brighton. I don’t hold out much hope though. I sit on my chair, and stare out of the window, across the Thames, and into an unknowable future.
***
Around quarter to five, my phone rings. It’s a mobile number that neither I nor my address book recognise.
It’s Brighton & Hove City Council, Emergency Accommodation. They have a flat for me in which to self-isolate, in a hostel that I am familiar with from my 12 years living in Brighton. The guy on the phone gives me the address, and tells me the staff there will have gone home but security are expecting me, and will take me to the flat.
After the call, I feel delighted, but also completely thrown. I was looking forward to another night on the ward, and now I feel uprooted. It’s a strange feeling, I’ve wanted a place to live since August, now that I have one, I’m terrified. I stare out at the Thames, watching the dappling sun fade away on the water. The last time I’ll see it. The last time I’ll ever have this view. These relationships. This feeling of being totally held and protected, and of being acutely conscious of that. The last time I had it, as a young child, a baby, I wasn’t even aware of it. Now I know exactly what I’m losing.
I get myself dressed, back into the faded clothes of the homeless man I once was. They’re all I have now, the rest of my meagre set of clothes are in my locker at the day centre, now shut down and inaccessible due to the very virus that led to my stay in this womb, and now, to the end of that homelessness. It’s a new beginning, and I’m not ready for it.
After an hour or two though, it becomes apparent that nobody is going to release me tonight, there’s nobody around to do it, to sign the discharge papers, to prepare the meds I will need to take away with me. To organise the transport – I can hardly jump on a train. I begin to relax, and digest the sudden transformation. With the space to do it, I feel better able to accept, and look forward to, the next phase of my life.
In the end, it’s an eventful evening, and I am very glad I was able to stick around.
***
It's early evening, and Nurses A. and P. are finishing up in the ward. Nurse P. is looking out of the window.
“Oh look,” she says suddenly “The wheel has turned blue!” Nurse A. looks round.
“They’ve turned the wheel blue for us!” I am puzzled, not understanding what they mean. It’s not long before we find out.
B. gets a call from his wife. Afterwards he tells T. and I that the whole country stopped at 8pm to applaud the NHS. I am instantly, incredibly moved. What a wonderful thing, and how absolutely fitting and right. Sitting in our beds, we are privy more than most to what an incredible job is being done by all the staff here.
***
That evening, we once again cheekily ask for a round of sandwiches. The young nurse, a trainee, disappears and it’s a while before she comes back. When she does though, she has a box of sandwiches each for us.
“I had to go to several different wards to get all of these,” she tells us, not with rancour but simply reporting back. We are all unbelievably touched by the efforts she has gone to.
“It’s fine,” she tells us “If you’re asking for sandwiches it means you’re getting better.”
It seems perfectly natural and right then that all three of us burst into spontaneous applause. Pleased, and only slightly embarrassed, she goes about her business, another angel on a ward full of them.
***
I am really missing a newspaper, something to read, and also some way of discovering how the world is reacting to this situation. I mention this to the bustling, ever efficient Nurse A.
Nurse A. Is someone who likes to be on the ward. She doesn’t suit being out at the nurses station, for her, this is a hands on job, and being with the patients is what she loves best. I suspect that many of the nursing staff feel this way, but Nurse A. is the first one who has articulated it. She has been a nurse for 7 years, and worked with people with dementia when she was 17. One of her patients then was a farmer’s wife, and there were evenings sometimes when Nurse A. couldn’t leave until she had helped the woman ‘shoo out the geese’. Helping people is an intrinsic part of Nurse A.’s make-up. She is more than happy to get me a paper. “I’m not working tomorrow,” she tells me “But I’ll drop you in a newspaper.”
“I might be gone before then,” I say, “But you can leave it for the boys.”
Friday
Around 9am, when B. goes out to the toilet, he runs into Nurse A.. Despite the fact that this is her day off, she is here, arms full of newspapers. She leaves them on the side, and I bring them in. There is a Times, an Express, and the Telegraph. There is also a note, which reads “Beds 14-17. To B., Steven, T. and N., from Nurse A. who worked yesterday.”
I still have that note.
T. takes the Express, and I take the Times. “Oh, I see you left me the Torygraph,” muses B when he returns from his ablutions. I tell him he can read my Times now, as I only want it for something to read later, when I leave, but he declines. For the rest of the morning he happily regales us with statistics from the Torygraph’s financial pages.
***
B. has discovered that if the device that measures oxygen saturation in the blood is hooked up to his ear, rather than his finger, the reading is higher. This is hugely important, since the level of saturation is the figure that will decide when he is allowed to go home.
We have been talking all week about the stats, and how doctors use them to determine everything. And yet, they are not always accurate, as this latest discovery attests. It makes us wonder about the decisions that are being made on the basis of the stats. It was the stats that told the doctor in the late evening of Monday that B. was not likely to get any better, and that he should phone his wife and say his goodbyes. And yet, it is often the insights of the staff who are working more closely with the patients that are more reliable. It was the nurse doing the obs who suggested that she hook the monitor to the ear rather than the finger, after B. had told her that he suffered with poor circulation in his hand. He was also told, when he was in the isolation unit, that a good way of relieving the symptoms of pneumonia is to lie on your front. As a result, we have all been sleeping on our stomachs. Now, all three of us are not far from going home.
Naturally, I think about R., in the bed space before B., placed on life support and moved to intensive care. Was this based on the stats? Was he sleeping face down? I’m pretty sure the saturation levels were taken from his finger. He was quite ill, it was true, his hacking coughs painful to witness. But we’re all in the dark here, and feeling our ways’ forward. Nurses’ tips and insights are often all we have to light the gloom.
***
N. has recovered from his subdued period, and seems as well as he has ever been. At one point, he looks at me curiously.
“What’s that on you head?” he asks.
“My hair?” I postulate.
“You’ve got something on your head.”
“I don’t have anything on my head, N.,” I tell him decisively. N. looks at me, but doesn’t say anything. T. finds the whole exchange highly amusing. Later, N. tells me “You’ve got stuff on your face!” which makes T. beam with joy. I wonder what this strange ectoplasm is that only N. can see. I hope it isn’t portentous.
***
I phone N., the secretary at St Saviours. She has spoken to my Mum already so knows I’m in hospital. She asks me how I am, and I tell her. “Being released today. And I’ve got a flat! Only it’s in Brighton.” We chat about the situation. Everybody at the church is well, as far as she aware. She gives me a big bit of news.
“Boris has got it!”
“You’re joking!” I exclaim, though I know she isn’t.
After our conversation I share the news about Boris with B. and T.. They are suitably impressed, this is bigger news even than Charlie. Impressive too is how indiscriminate the virus is.
***
I don’t know how it started. Maybe it was B., maybe T.. I don’t know what triggered it. But one of them started singing ‘My Dear Old Dutch’, the other accompanied – and then unexpectedly and magically, N. began to join in too! All three of them, singing the first verse and chorus of My Dear Old Dutch, while the nurse and I looked on, smiling faintly, and shaking our heads. After a minute or so, when they finished, all I could say was;
“I have no idea what that was, but it was amazing.”
If this were a film, that would definitely have been the final scene.
***
In the end, things happen fast. An ambulance is organised, my meds prepared. Conscious that I am going to a hostel where I will be unable to leave my flat, the junior doctor organises some bedding and towels for me to take away, as well as a big bag of food to get me through. I manage to wolf down my final dinner. Then there is only time for quick goodbyes.
“Gentlemen, it’s been a pleasure,” I tell B. and T.. They wish me well, and ask me to let them know when I arrive at the hostel. I shout a goodbye to N., but he doesn’t respond. Finally, I slip out of the womb, and into an uncertain new world.