I couldn’t sleep at night. I had pains behind the eyes. . . . I had pains in the stomach. . . . I had pains in the chest.
So I became an out-patient at the Melbourne Hospital.
There were at least thirty of us. We sat on benches before a clinic door at which we gazed like a theatre audience at a drop curtain just before an entertainment. We knew that behind that door specialists in the ills of our bodies were busy sharpening knives and threading needles in anticipation of a furious attack on our carcasses.
Anyway the wharfie behind me put it something like that.
‘They’re in there,’ he said, ‘just waitin’—ready to hack into us.’
‘What’s wrong with you?’ I asked.
‘I’m crook,’ he said.
‘How crook?’ I asked him.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I can’t digest nothin’. I go all of a rumble and when I’m on the hook I blow out. We’ve been stowin’ wool,’ he added.
‘I get pains behind the eyes,’ I said. ‘I can’t eat anything either.’
‘Does your head ache when you bend down to lace your boots?’ the woman with the broken nose asked me. She was sitting on my left.
‘I’ll say it does,’ I said.
‘You have sinus trouble,’ she said promptly. ‘Sleep with a hot water bottle against your head. It’ll relieve you.’
‘It wouldn’t relieve his guts,’ said the wharf labourer.
‘Tch! Tch!’ said a thin woman with spectacles.
‘Duodenal ulcer,’ murmured a dark man two seats back. ‘It goes with infected antrums.’
I stood up so that I could see him. ‘What!’ I exclaimed. I had the wind up.
‘My sister,’ said a woman with a red jumper, ‘had both her antrums taken out. She’s never been the same woman since.’
‘Get out!’ said a man behind her, rudely. ‘You can’t cut them out. They’re holes.’
I sat down and communed with my stomach.
‘This duodenal ulcer,’ said the wharfie anxiously. ‘How do you know you got it?’
‘You only feel comfortable when you are full,’ said the man two seats back.
‘What! Shicker?’ exclaimed the wharfie.
‘No. After meals,’ said the man.
‘That’s me,’ said the wharfie sighing. ‘By hell it is! I always feel good after meals.’ He lapsed into troubled thought.
‘Your stomach has been infected by your antrums,’ the woman with the broken nose breathed into my ear. ‘Do your ears crack when you blow your nose?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘That’s very dangerous,’ she warned me. ‘Don’t do it.’
‘I won’t,’ I promised her.
‘Both your antrums are gone,’ she informed me.
‘You don’t say,’ I said holding my head towards her anxiously.
‘As for the duodenal ulcer, they’ll cut that out.’
‘What’s that?’ exclaimed the wharfie, overhearing the remark. ‘You hang on to ya guts, boy.’
‘Tch! Tch!’ said the thin woman with spectacles.
‘I know a bloke —,’ began the wharfie.
A man with melancholy eyes, sitting behind me, tapped me on the shoulder.
‘If you want to cure your antrums inhale a twenty-five per cent menthol in tincture of benzoin compound three times a day. Put a few drops in boiling water.’
‘Wrap a towel round your head,’ added the dark man two seats back.
‘Sniff it gently at first,’ said the asthmatical youth beside him.
‘They’ll never operate on me,’ growled the wharfie, rousing himself to defiance. ‘Hey!’ he said to the woman in the red jumper who was discussing ulcers with the asthmatical youth. ‘Ain’t there any cure without your guts being cut into?’
‘Tch! Tch!’ said the thin woman with spectacles.
‘There’s a diet for it,’ said a fat man with a scar on his cheek. ‘I’m on it. I’ve got it here.’
‘Let’s hear it,’ said the wharfie.
The fat man took a type-written sheet from his pocket and commenced to read.
‘Poultry or sea-foods of any description must not be eaten.’ He looked up. ‘You see,’ he explained, ‘they contain the protamine protein which plays hell with the lining of your belly.’
Tch! Tch!’ said the thin woman with spectacles.
‘What’s that?’ I interjected, turning from the woman with the broken nose who was prophesying a slow death for me.
‘Stop talkin’,’ ordered the wharfie gesturing silence. ‘This is what we gotta eat.’
‘It says you must have all the vitamins,’ went on the fat man.
‘Vitamin E?’ asked a cynical youth from the rear.
‘Of course.’
‘Good!’ said the youth.
‘We’ll blast the hopes
Of Marie Stopes
With good old Vitamin E, me lads.
With good old Vitamin E.’
‘Every morning at ten o’clock,’ continued the fat man, ignoring the youth, ‘you must drink a glass of pineapple juice and every afternoon at three, a glass of orange juice. All vegetables must be puree.’
‘Ha!’ The wharfie smacked his knee and laughed sardonically. ‘I like that. Ha!’
He enlarged his audience by turning and including those in the rear in a sweeping glance calculated to convey to all of us his contempt for the fat man’s diet.
‘I like that. Can you see me drinking pineapple juice with the Heeler-up on my tail?’
‘Tch! Tch!’ said the thin woman with spectacles.
The wharfie, suddenly depressed, addressed me: ‘I wish to hell I had nothin’ wrong with me. I’d be a happy man if the doctor in there said: “You’ve got nothin’ wrong with you.”’
‘What good would that do, if you are still sick?’ I said.
‘What! I’d feel good once I knew there was nothin’ wrong with me.’
‘You’ve got something wrong with you all right,’ said the woman with the broken nose. ‘I don’t like your colour.’
‘Christ!’ breathed the wharfie.
‘Tch! Tch!’ said the thin woman with spectacles.
‘How do you mean, colour?’ asked the wharfie respectfully.
‘You’re yellow,’ snapped the broken-nosed woman thrusting her face at the wharfie as if her remark were an accusation.
‘By hell I’m not!’ protested the wharfie. ‘I’m frightened of no one. One gets the wind up in front of these doctors,’ he explained to me in a quieter aside, ‘But that’s natural. This dame reckons because a bloke shakes, he’s yellow.’
But I was thinking of myself. ‘I’m crook,’ I said.
‘Giddy?’ questioned the broken-nosed woman raising her brows and looking sideways at me.
‘A little,’ I said.
‘Get on a strict diet as soon as you can or that ulcer of yours will end in a haemorrhage,’ she said.
‘Look!’ I said to the wharfie. ‘What do I want to go in to those doctors for? I know what’s wrong with me. They’ve told me here. I’ve got sinus trouble. Both my antrums are gone. To cure that I’ve got to sleep with a hot bottle on my head and never lace my boots. I’ve got to inhale a twenty-five per cent menthol in tincture of benzoin compound three times a day in boiling water. I’m to inhale gently with my head under a towel. I’ve got a duodenal ulcer caused by infected antrums. Eventually I’ll have to get it cut out, after which I’ll never be the same man again. In the meantime all the vegetables I am to eat are to be puree. I’m to drink pineapple juice in the morning and orange juice in the afternoon. I must go on this strict diet to prevent a haemorrhage. If I eat sea-foods I’m up against the protamine protein. I’m going home. We’ve got corn beef and carrots for dinner and, boy, am I going to have a feed.’
‘Corn beef and carrots,’ murmured the wharfie ecstatically.
‘A lot of good that will do you,’ sniffed the woman with the broken nose, looking at me. ‘The quicker you are operated on the better.’
I decided to stay.
‘You hang on to ya guts,’ warned the wharfie.
‘Tch! Tch!’ said the thin woman with spectacles.
‘No operations for me,’ said the wharfie. ‘All I want’s medicine. Now, say the doctor in there says to me: “You’ll have to knock off work.” Say he said that. What’d I do? I’d go to work just the same. I can’t knock off work just because a doctor says to. What’d the missus live on? An’ say he said I gotta drink pineapple juice an’ that. How’d I get hold of pineapple juice when I’m stowin’ wool. No. What I want is a powder or somethin’.’
The electric bell above the clinic door rang. We all moved expectantly. A man on the end of the front seat sprang forward.
‘They’re racing,’ said the wharfie.
The bell rang again. The next in turn left his seat. We slid along the smooth forms, the end ones filling the vacancies left by those who had come before them. As the front seat emptied, those behind stepped around the end of the form and took their place in the van.
We were all strangely silent. We sat and watched the door, our hearts beating, the illnesses within us sinking to a temporary coma while we waited our turn.
The wharfie and I answered a double ring. Behind the door four doctors sat at a table questioning those that had come in before us. They listened expressionlessly to the replies. The patients leant towards the doctors and spoke earnestly, with sad faces, of the pains and ills from which they suffered. Every now and then the doctors recorded one of their remarks on a yellow card. Mostly they disregarded symptoms which to them were unimportant but which had filled the patient with foreboding.
The wharfie and I stood very still, very quietly. We were awed by the immensity of illness in the abstract. The combined pains of all those who had passed through this room weighed heavily upon us and silenced us like a hand on our mouths.
Later, after a glance at our cards, one of the doctors ordered us to wait against the wall for examination by another doctor who had left the room.
We stood beside an open doorway through which we could see five men seated before small tables. An old man whose face had the simplicity of a child occupied the chair confronting the doorway.
‘What’s going on in here?’ the wharfie asked him in a whisper.
‘We’re having a test meal,’ replied the old man. ‘After you eat it they know what’s wrong with you. Next day, I mean, they will.’
‘Fancy that!’ whispered the wharfie.
A nurse approached the old man, carrying a rubber tube about a yard in length. A small, pointed, metal strainer was attached to one end. She held it suspended above the old man’s head like a magpie about to feed a worm to its young.
‘Open your mouth and say “ah”,’ she said. ‘You are to swallow this tube, leaving about three inches of it projecting from your mouth.’
The old man threw back his head and, with eyes closed, opened his mouth and began a dutiful series of ‘ahs’.
The nurse lowered her hand. The glittering metal end swung to and fro across the cavity of his open mouth then dropped swiftly from sight.
The old man’s ‘ah’ was a gentle and uninspiring sound, but as the metal plummet crossed his gullet it swelled into a prolonged ‘a-a-a-a-a-h’ of desperate panic. He heaved beneath the extended tube like a trout being played by an angler.
‘Here. Take it yourself,’ said the nurse. ‘Swallow it slowly.’
The wharfie’s feelings burst into words: ‘It’s murder,’ he said.
The old man, with convulsive gasps and jerking head movements, slowly swallowed the tube. Tears forced themselves from beneath his clenched eyelids and trickled slowly down his cheeks.
Suddenly his eyes opened. The hand holding the tube froze into stillness. His neck stiffened. He gazed tensely at the ceiling then rolled his eyes in the direction of the wharfie with an anguished appeal stamping them.
‘I got a helluva pain in me heart,’ he mumbled urgently. ‘The tube’s tangled round me heart. S’elp me God, it is. I can feel it. It’s stranglin’ it. S’help me God. . . .’
The wharfie crouched and reached both arms towards him as if about to grapple with a creature attacking the old man.
The old man suddenly sprang to his feet. He jumped into the air like an excited schoolboy then stood gazing fixedly at the floor, deadly still, the red rubber tube dangling from his mouth like a piece of unswallowed spaghetti. He listened as if for a hail from a distant friend.
A wet smile changed his expression. He sat down with a certain satisfaction and breathed a sigh of relief.
‘By God! It stopped all right,’ he said to the wharfie. ‘Just like that.’ He flicked his finger and thumb. ‘If I hadn’t jumped and started it, I’d never have got it going.’
‘Whatta you know about that,’ whispered the wharfie.
We were called to the table.
‘We’re for it,’ I said.
‘What is your trouble?’ asked the doctor, addressing the wharfie.
‘Well, it’s like this. I can’t eat nothin’ but what I want to spew it up again. I’ve always got pains in me guts and I get headaches. Hell! I get headaches. After a few beers I feel sick as a dog. All I want is a bit of powder. Nothing expensive like. You know . . .’
Ten minutes later we passed through the door.
‘It’s going to be the end of me,’ growled the wharfie. ‘We’ll never be any good after that.’
‘But we’re no good now,’ I said.
‘We’ll never be much good whatever we do,’ sighed the wharfie. ‘It’s a cow.’
‘How did you get on?’ called the asthmatical youth who was sitting on the front bench.
‘We’re both to have a test meal tomorrow morning,’ announced the wharfie sepulchrally.
‘Well! Well!’ said the fat man.
‘It’s goodbye to my guts,’ said the wharfie.
‘Tch! Tch!’ said the thin woman with spectacles.