If that whole rigmarole wasn’t enough, the second thing depressing him was that he was having to pee into a pot because they were monitoring his intake and output of fluid. They were actually measuring how many millilitres of drink he was taking on board and how much he was whizzing out the other end.
Rather than the usual technique of heading to the gents, there were all sorts of processes to follow. Ones that made wearing your best suit jacket rather complicated. He wasn’t going to take it off though. If he let his guard down they were bound to see it as a win. Because despite the efforts being made to care for him, he did rather feel as if he were in a battle with the staff, especially the nurse in charge. They didn’t understand him. He was trying to tell them important things, but the ward sister told him they were too busy whenever he tried to share his pain.
He didn’t blame them. They had a job to get on with and counselling for more than five minutes wasn’t part and parcel of the process. But that didn’t help him. It didn’t alleviate the depression that was beginning to overtake him. When people mentioned the plan for him returning home and he burst out crying, they weren’t able to offer him answers. No one was able to remedy the situation he was in and that wrecked him even more.
For now, they just wanted to get him stable, the doctors kept saying, as if they knew that the chances of him ever healing from this were diminishing. It wasn’t that his heart had broken once. It was breaking repeatedly. Every time he remembered what had happened, it was as if parts of him were shattering, as if his organs were made of glass.
Maybe that’s what had occurred. Where he was once made of flesh and bone, he was now brittle, parts of him splintering at every opportunity.
He no longer knew how to paste a smile on his face.
The pocketbook of jokes he had memorised to make people laugh seemed to have slipped into a wet puddle and was beyond recovery. Even his manners, which he prided himself on, had nose-dived.
There wasn’t much left of the Clive Ellington he knew.
He realised that the day he threw a bedpan in anger. He’d never known himself to be in a situation where he had so much pent-up emotion and nowhere to place it. Throwing things wasn’t the answer and he was ashamed for having done it, but what else was he to do?
The Clive Ellington he knew had been alive.
This Clive Ellington was dead and yet somehow still living.
At least this Clive Ellington still owned the best jacket this entire postcode had ever known. And he was going to wear it. No matter what.
5
Keisha
It’s safe to say I’m not a fan of the unfamiliar. I’m never keen on going to new places. It brings about a kind of anxiety that is hard to explain. This is coming from someone who can’t even claim to be at ease in their usual surroundings, so you’ll understand that going to different environments isn’t something I do willingly.
I’ve conquered this fear before. I have to remind myself this isn’t the first time. I know this place. This will be the fifth visit I’ve made to Southampton General Hospital for the purpose of my PhD. On each of those occasions I have realised it’s not been about dealing with a mere hospital. It is more like a whole city. It is a huge and daunting place that has more departments and specialities than I could ever possibly list without putting a person to sleep.
It should be an insurmountable experience coming here, but there is one thing that I find extraordinarily comforting about the place… It is alive. It has a pulse. There is a coming and going to it – a rhythm – that makes it seem as if this place has a heart.
There is a coffee shop at the entrance and I can’t help but indulge in a hot chocolate and enjoy a spot of people watching, knowing that here there is every walk of life, every possible eventuality, wandering in and out of the automatic doors. I savour the two pink marshmallows that are on my saucer as relatively healthy allowable treats, dancing their spongey softness on my lips for a moment of pleasure.