by Doyle, Paddy
Though my vision was clouded by tears I could see the senior nurse talking to a doctor. I couldn’t hear what they were saying and I didn’t care. They stopped dragging at me and for a moment I thought I was going to be returned to the ward, then I saw the doctor return. He had a needle and syringe prepared in the kidney dish he was carrying.
‘Now, Pat,’ he said gently, ‘this will make you feel better.’
‘I don’t want that needle,’ I protested.
He inserted the needle into a vein in my right arm which was held in an outright position. I felt it puncture my skin and I screamed again. Within minutes my screaming and protestations stopped, my vision became clouded and my mouth felt dry. I was so light-headed that I could no longer walk. I had to be lifted and carried to a waiting ambulance where I was put lying on one of its two stretchers. The nurse who was travelling woke me when we reached Dublin. I was thirsty and she gave me some water from a plastic bottle.
‘How far is it now?’ I asked.
‘Just a couple of minutes,’ she replied and suggested that I sit up and fix my clothes. She wiped my face with a cool damp towel, which made me feel more alert. I began to worry again.
I felt very weak walking up the granite steps of the Dublin hospital, with its tall Georgian facade and massive hall door. The nurse greeted the porter who directed her to the admissions office. She sat me down on a long bench and gave me my chart to keep on my lap. The waiting area was dark and quiet; the only light available came from the sliding glass panels of the admissions office itself.
‘Someone will look after you in a minute or two,’ she said and prepared to leave.
She brushed my fringe off my forehead with her hand and said that she would see me soon again. I looked at her but didn’t speak, then I bowed my head as she walked away.
An attractive, dark-haired young woman came to the window of the admissions office and asked me to come in. She wore bright red lipstick and I couldn’t help noticing the length of her fingernails and the fact they were painted to match her lips. I handed her my chart and she copied down the information from it. Every time she smiled, she revealed two rows of pure white, straight teeth slightly stained by her lipstick.
‘And you’re just nine years of age, Patrick, is that right?’ she asked in a refined accent.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘You’re a very big man for nine, and very brave too.’
I forced a smile. I knew I was very small and slight for my age. Then she said I was making a bit of history, as I was the only child in the hospital. She couldn’t remember if anyone so young had been admitted before. Because I was the youngest person there, she suggested that I should receive special treatment.
‘You don’t have any brothers, do you?’
‘No.’
‘Well I have three brothers who are a little bit bigger than you. They have lots and lots of comics and I think you should have some of them to read while you’re with us. Isn’t that a good idea?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I replied.
She telephoned to tell a nurse that the patient they were expecting was now ready to go to the ward. I became nervous and began to cry. The receptionist did her best to comfort me with assurances that she would be calling with the comics and that I would get to like the hospital after the first few days.
A nurse came and brought me the short distance to the lift. She slammed its criss-crossed iron gate and pressed the button numbered three. Its sudden movement frightened me and I held her hand tightly until it stopped with a jolt. When the gates opened, I stepped out quickly.
St Patrick’s Ward was bigger than any ward I had ever been in. Its high walls were painted two different shades of green with a grey dividing line. The windows were very tall and had ropes to open the top sections. The amount of light getting into the ward during the day was restricted because of shadows cast by other parts of the building which jutted out from the ward I was in. The view from the windows consisted of the back of other buildings, and, looking down, I could see the felted roof of what was obviously a new extension to the hospital. Large fluorescent lights hung from the ceiling, suspended with chains and covered by wide metal shades. They were only switched off on the brightest days and then only for a very short time. The patients were mainly elderly, though there were a few who were probably in their twenties. The coughing and discharging of phlegm into stainless steel cups were sounds I had experienced before; so was the smell of stale urine from uncovered bottles on the floor under some of the beds. What scared me were the painful groans of a man whose bed had been screened off, his voice feeble and tired as he tried to get the attention of one of the nurses. The only evidence of his existence, apart from the groaning, was the sight of a circular glass bottle, inverted and discharging blood into his arm from a T-shaped stand. Patients like him were screened off most of the time, though whenever a nurse went inside their curtains to adjust the flow rate of the drip, I made a point of peeping through gaps to see as much as I could. I was always frightened by what I’d see – a sickly-looking man propped up on many pillows, his arm strapped to a plastic-covered splint to prevent him flexing it where a needle with its tube attached entered his skin. His face would be grey and lifeless, his cheeks sunken and his dull eyes stared from deep caverns framed by black circular lines. Inevitably they died. The entire ward joined the hospital chaplain as he recited a decade of the Rosary for the departed soul.
‘He has left this world,’ the priest would say, ‘and gone to a place where he will experience no more pain, only joy and happiness, eternal life with God and His angels.’
Whenever a death occurred those men who were allowed out of bed took it in turns to pray beside the corpse. They opened and closed the screens gently to avoid making unnecessary noise. Distraught relatives arrived, crying wearily despite the best efforts of nurses and nuns to comfort them. Often wives, their faces distorted with grief, wailed openly and pleaded with the Almighty to give them back their husbands. Grieving sons and daughters tried to console them only to find that they too were angry with the compassionate God who had taken their father. The priest held the hands of the people overcome with pain and grief and reminded them that it was the will of God that their loved one had been taken. During my stay in that hospital I was to witness the heartbreak and the agony of death many times, I was also to become less afraid of it than I had previously been.
Because I was so young, nurses and patients tried to protect me from these scenes. I was given comics to occupy my mind and distract me from what was happening. This practice served only to make me more curious about the subject, and even though I was terrified of dying, I wanted to know what a dead person looked like.
A man died and I asked a nurse if I could go behind the screens and see him, saying that I wanted to say a prayer for him.
She hesitated and then said she would carry me as long as I was sure that I wouldn’t be frightened.
‘I can walk over,’ I said.
‘No,’ she insisted, ‘I’ll carry you.’
She lifted me into her arms, asking me not to squash her white triangular veil. I carefully put my hands underneath it and she asked me to make sure I didn’t pull it off altogether. I grew tense as I got near to the dead man, and wondered if she could feel me trembling. She opened the screens and from her arms I looked directly down on the man’s sunken, marble-like face.
‘He’s just like he’s asleep,’ I whispered, somehow realizing that to speak out loud would be wrong.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it’s like going asleep and never waking again.’
His hands were crossed on his chest and there was a Rosary beads and brown scapular entwined in his fingers. Beside the bed a small table was covered by a white cloth embroidered with a gold cross. A candle burned in its brass holder beside holy water in a brass bowl.
‘How do you die?’ I asked her as she carried me back to bed.
‘Your heart stops,’ she said, putting her hand
inside my pyjamas’ top and holding it gently over my heart. ‘Your heart is beating away in there and it will beat for many, many years to come.’
She tucked in the covers tightly over me, then took my face in her hands and kissed me lightly on the forehead before walking away. The tenderness of that moment is something I will never forget.
During my first weeks there I was examined by many students. Mostly they were in groups accompanied by a senior doctor, but sometimes by themselves. At other times it would be one or two students. Such experiences were always embarrassing and seemed devoid of any consideration of how I felt. Bedcovers were literally thrown back, and my clothes removed without anyone ever asking whether I objected. A group of staring eyes pierced my naked body while first one, then a second, third and fourth tried out various examinations, from simply listening to my heart and lungs to holding their hands beneath my testicles and asking me to cough. There was the usual barrage of questions about whether either my father or mother had any form of illness. I didn’t know and said so. Brothers and sisters, what about them? I had a sister and told them that she was all right. Foreign students were the most difficult to deal with. Their accents were strange and I had the greatest difficulty understanding their questions. When I did answer, I often had to repeat myself as they didn’t appear to understand me. Group examinations often lasted an hour, after which there was practically no part of me left untouched. When they were finished they simply left me behind the screens where I put back on my pyjamas and waited for a nurse to remake the bed.
While in St Patrick’s Ward, I was under the care of Professor Casey, an elderly bespectacled man with a deeply wrinkled, kind face. He always smiled at me as he approached my bed flanked by an entourage of students and other doctors, seeking a diagnosis from the students after they had examined me.
He’d pointed out that I had been in three hospitals before this one and that so far there was no positive diagnosis of my condition made. He’d refer briefly to post polio before dismissing it on the grounds that there were none of the symptoms associated with that condition, such as muscle wastage or paralysis.
One morning as his students listened attentively he suggested that there might be some neurological disorder which would take time to ascertain. A biopsy would have to be done and the results closely looked at. He finally said the words I feared most. ‘I will be taking him down to theatre in the morning.’ As I shivered with fright, he suggested that those interested in furthering their medical careers should be present. Having spoken briefly to the ward sister, the Professor came to my bedside and told me he would see me in the morning.
The greatest fear I had, that of being operated on, was about to become a reality. I wanted to scream but was too terrified to do so. I thought of dying and when asked about going to confession I readily accepted. My old fear of dying returned as I confessed to telling lies and being disobedient to the hospital chaplain. While he was imparting absolution, I wondered if I had told him everything. Somehow surgery and death had become inextricably linked in my mind. I was certain I would die. The years of giving answers which I thought would prevent an operation were gone. The worst thing that could ever happen to me was less than twenty-four hours away.
In the afternoon a nurse came to my bed to prepare me for the operation. She removed my pyjamas’ bottom and shaved all the fine hair from my left thigh. As the razor glided over my soapy skin I was trembling so much she had to repeatedly warn me of the danger of being cut. She looked closely at my pubic area and decided it did not require shaving.
There was an elderly man in the bed next to mine who was also going to theatre. More than anything else, he convinced me that not only was I likely to die, but so was he. He dragged out his words as he spoke in a loud thick country accent which I found difficult to understand. He insisted that I join him in saying the Rosary and when he started I had no choice but to answer the prayers.
After tea, signs were hung on our beds indicating that we were fasting.
‘Oh ’tis a bad sign when ye have to see the like of that thing being hung on the bed. They starve ye first and then they set about cutting ye up while ye’r asleep.’
‘They’re not going to have to put me asleep,’ I said.
‘Sure how can ye have an operation without them knocking ye out? Who told ye that?’
‘The nurse did.’
‘God bless yer innocence, son, but I’d not believe a word that’d come out of the mouth of them people. They mean well I know, but they don’t be telling the truth all the bloody time. They’d say anything to keep ye from asking questions.’
I tried to ignore him, to block out what he was saying. I mistrusted doctors and nurses enough without him adding to it. He kept talking, dragging out the words he wanted to stress.
‘Sure they can’t go cuttin’ anyone open without having them asleep and once they have ye asleep, there’s no knowing whether ye’ll ever come out of it.’
By that night I was in a terrible state of panic, sweating profusely and crying. I didn’t want to believe anything he was saying, yet neither could I believe the nurses, despite their sincerity. When I could not get to sleep on my usual dosage of medication, I was given another dose equal to the first. Despite reproaches from the nurses and protests from other patients, the man beside me continued to pray aloud.
When I woke the following morning my bed was screened off. A nun recited the ‘Morning Offering’ and the baritone voices of the men responded wearily to her various invocations. Breakfast was being served, I could hear the domestic staff asking patients how much sugar they wanted in their tea and when to stop adding milk. Spoons tapped on eggshells or rang around the sides of cups being stirred. A nurse came through the screens to my bedside carrying a steel dish with a needle and syringe in it. She had cotton wool and a bottle labelled ‘ether’.
She helped me to change from my pyjamas into a long white cape which she tied at the back.
‘Lie on your side,’ she said, ‘I just want to give you a little injection.’ I lay with the gown up around my waist, tensely waiting for the needle.
‘Relax,’ she said as she swabbed the area with ether, ‘if you relax a bit you won’t feel a thing, it’s just a little prick.’
She administered the injection and I screamed, feeling the liquid in the syringe penetrate through the muscle in my backside before the needle was withdrawn and the area rubbed again with cold ether.
She asked me to allow her to wipe my face and to see me smiling. I was in no humour to oblige and buried my head deep into the pillow and wept.
The injection had the effect of making me drowsy and my mouth began to dry up. By swirling my tongue about I thought I might be able to create the moisture I so desperately craved. I drifted in and out of frighteningly colourful sleep, hallucinations and nightmares, blue rivers and green skies. Enormous spiders and ants crawled across my body. There was a sense of falling from a great height and being unable to stop.
‘Can I have a drink of water?’ I asked the nurse who came to check on me.
‘You can’t have any now, but you can have as much as you want when you come back.’
The fears I held were numbed by drugs, and when the trolley arrived to take me from the ward, I was too doped to be frightened. Two men dressed in light green cotton suits, wearing white cotton caps, and masks over their mouths, lifted me onto the trolley and pushed it to the lift. I heard the gates open and felt the wheels roll across the gap between the floor and the lift. I kept my eyes fixed on the ceiling as I was being wheeled to the operating room.
By the time I reached the theatre, the numbing effect of the drugs had given way to fear. I was alert, frightened and acutely aware of what was happening and being said. By contrast with the corridors outside, the theatre was brightly lit and smelt heavily of disinfectant and ether.
The consultant who was to perform the biopsy came to the side of the trolley and checked my pulse.
‘How are you?’ he
asked.
‘All right,’ I said, my voice trembling.
‘There is nothing to worry about. We’ll be finished before we get started.’ He laughed.
The intensity of the bright circular light overhead caused me to squint. Doctors and nurses gathered, one indistinguishable from the other, except by their voices, caps covering their heads and masks hiding their faces. A green cloth was draped over my face, reducing the blinding light to a dull shadow.
‘Are you all right under there?’ the cheerful voice of Professor Casey asked.
‘Yes,’ I replied.
‘You’re just going to feel a small injection on your thigh and that will be all. You can sing a song if you like.’
I cried as the injection was given and when I tried to reach my thigh with my hand it was pushed away.
‘That’s it now,’ Professor Casey said, ‘no more needles, and just another few minutes then we’re finished.’
There was a pause while they waited for the local anaesthetic to take effect before a voice asked if I could feel my thigh being pinched.
‘No,’ I answered.
Someone gripped my hand firmly as I perspired beneath the cloths that covered my body. I winced as the scalpel made its incision and though I couldn’t feel the actual cut being made, I felt a dull pain as my skin was opened.
‘That hurts,’ I said.
The consultant asked that another injection be given immediately. Nurses and some of the students were encouraging me to sing.
‘A person can hardly be expected to sing with a towel over his face,’ Professor Casey said.
The cloth was moved just enough to enable me to see directly over my head, it still covered my nose and mouth. I wonder how many people have actually sung ‘Kelly the Boy from Killane’ while undergoing surgery to the great amusement of all present?
