kagablog

148

Whilst water-skiing he was run over by a speed boat and churned up by its propeller. His shaven skull shows the terrible scar and depression. A broken right arm, smashed knee, left leg with four compound fractures. He is paralysed down the left side. He stares with big round eyes and speaks in a slow quiet voice that is still somewhere else. Deeply tanned, a big man powerfully built - a fine specimen of male meat. But now his round eyes stare unblinkingly, the whites contrasting against his brown face.

‘How do you feel?’

‘I feel like a vegetable. A mummy.’

An attractive young woman comes to sit with him for long periods, seeing to his needs, reading to him, talking and encouraging without sentimentality. When I see all the little things she does, the thoughtful necessities and the luxuries she brings him, I feel sick with an inexplicable sorrow. Home-made biscuits, a flask of soup, a pot plant, portable TV, radio, clock, tape recorder, shaver, special supports and pillows in bright patterns made by a woman’s loving hand. It isn’t possible to care that much for very long.

149

He complained to the sister that when he lifted Maureen, who is sixteen, she swore at him, calling him a ‘Fokken poes.’ He feigned an outraged shock and distress.

‘One so young!’

He repeated the epithet several times.

150

At tea time I went with the other orderly for a smoke. In his ancient car we drove down into Salt River. He stopped outside one of the houses in a grimy street and ran in for the parcel. Then we went to his place a block away. He had a cubicle at the back of the house. In the yard stood a large kennel and he insisted that we get into it in case the boere came. I crawled in after him. It was dark and stank of dog. We sat cramped together with knees drawn up and heads bent forward sharing the pipe in his cupped hands.

We returned to the ward smelling like curs, our white uniforms covered in hairs. I can’t say I felt euphoric but the patients appeared comical and the rest of the morning sped by almost unnoticed.

Now I am calm and sober and bored with the quiet of the afternoon.

151

This is the start of night duty. It is a warm sultry night and unless a cool wind springs up I don’t see myself being able to sleep much tomorrow.

152

The night seems to have passed much more rapidly than a day.

153

The world shrinks and closes in. It is an unnatural routine setting one apart from the rest of the world in such a way that there is virtually no contact. They arrive and we leave, they work and we sleep. The two routines complement each other and the creatures of the night become separated, cut off, strangers glimpsed as hurrying shadows at dusk and dawn.

154

Outside it has been raining and it is cooler but unless a wind picks up it will be very humid and worse than ever.

The activity below increases as the night advances. A drunken man covered in blood staggers from an ambulance shouting, ‘Waar is hulle? Waar is hulle? Net wys vir my. Waar is die poeste?’

In the lamplight the tarmac is still dark with the wetness of rain. The voices of ambulance men talking, a guffaw of laughter. Already a pattern is discernible and it is possible to make generalisations. Most attempts at suicide occur Saturday afternoon and evening. Stab wound victims between ten-thirty and eleven-thirty. Car accident cases between twelve and two. This predictability casts a steady impersonal light upon faceless citizens barely human.

155

He believes it was some kind of ESP that made him depart from normal practice and don a crash helmet instead of bathing cap on the day of his dreadful accident.

156

By no stretch of the imagination could I be deemed a happy man. I am troubled and restless - a godless man. We are all godless men.

It is cool and very quiet this Friday night.

157

The senior nurse is deranged. She rambles on about being born again and about the glory of the gospel. She relates amazing tales of the Devil and demon worship. She tells an anecdote about enlisting divine assistance in getting her washing dry - she wanted to hang it out but it was pouring with rain so on bended knee she importuned for a change in weather. Lo and behold, within five minutes the sky was clear. It just shows you.

158

‘We have to ask ourselves whether medicine is to remain a humanitarian and respected profession or a new but depersonalized science in the service of prolonging life rather than diminishing human suffering.’ I wrote it down but can’t remember where I heard or read it. Laing?

159

A cool night without wind. It is overcast and there is a strongly fishy sea smell, wonderfully fresh as if a northwester is bringing it in from the Atlantic.

The boy has cancer. It is intended that his leg be amputated at the hip. His parents are Jehovah’s Witnesses and refuse consent for blood transfusion, but he must also undergo intensive cytotoxic treatment to arrest further spread of the disease. This treatment is so horribly drastic that it is certain he would require blood.

The wrong-mindedness of religious fanatics? The doctors are agreed that the carcinoma has reached a terminal stage and that whatever is done the boy is going to die anyway. The treatment is experimental. Maybe they will learn something from it. So the parents’ refusal will save him a whole heap of agony. God works in wondrous ways.

They say that earlier today he climbed out of the window and sat on the ledge, ’sunbathing.’ It is feared he might have had intentions of suicide. His surgeon, on being consulted, prescribed ten milligrams of Valium three times a day. The houseman had to lie to get him to take the sedative, telling him it was ‘for the blood.’

A precocious but rather nice boy he has been capitalising on his situation and manipulating it to charm the nurses and young girls who come to hold his hand and talk to him. They allow him to kiss them and secretly touch their breasts and run a hand over their cute little rumps. Now he is to be reduced to a zombie this pleasure will be denied him. He will be too drugged to take any kind of interest in such matters.

160

Like polar cold my discontent penetrates to the bone. I have no choice.

161

I sit in the office much of the time, one eye on the red light above the door, arguing points of religion with this crazy senior nurse. She has not one but three Bibles open on the desk before her. Also she has any number of those tiresome tracts that pose impossible questions like, ‘Where are you going?’ and give unbelievably simple answers such as: ‘God gave you a free will. You can choose between everlasting life and eternal damnation.’

I argue out of boredom, and yet I find the arguing itself excruciatingly stale and tiring. We are from different galaxies.

162

Lancelot Brown is sixty-six. He has pinched features, the cheeks falling in, cheekbones, chin, nose, forehead becoming more prominent as if the skin were being stretched tighter and tighter. He has the dirty pallor of the old and gravely ill. Fearful, pain-filled eyes, pleading, at times treacherous and cunning, frightened, frightened. A fractured femur has brought him here but he also has extensive CA.

He does not bear pain well. After groaning and crying he is cringingly apologetic. His bowels work profusely and it is difficult moving him with this goddam fucking useless Thomas splint on the broken leg. He professes pain in every part of his body.

The other patients are embarrassed and resentful and alarmed by his plight. They are often unsympathetic and cruel, laughing at his loss of dignity, complaining about the offensiveness of his smell.

His wife knows the prognosis and needs support. This afternoon she became tearful and turned to a nurse for comfort. What comfort?