16

THE THREE MONTHS that I spent in hospital – I had two periods of six weeks each – were very different indeed.

I first went because I had a gastric ulcer. It was in 1944 and there was no National Health Service then. I was suffering from indigestion according to my doctor.

I said to him, ‘I can’t understand why I can’t breathe properly.’

But he said it was indigestion and indigestion it had to be till I had a haemorrhage and was rushed into hospital to have a blood transfusion.

I often think that these people who talk about blood and breeding and who have to have blood transfusions don’t know what poor old plebeian stuff they’ve got knocking around in them. I remember when they were giving it to me I said, ‘I hope you’re giving me blue blood, I’m only used to the best.’

The nursing was splendid but the food and amenities for the patients in the public wards were deplorable. And the lack of privacy most distressing, especially for older people and particularly for those who had gone into hospital for the very first time.

None of the beds had curtains and only in the direst circumstances did they put screens around them. Some of the old people used to complain bitterly about this but it never did them any good because the more they complained the less consideration they got.

I always found during my stay in hospitals, and that includes before and after the National Health Service, that it’s best to accept everything that happens to you with the spirit of Job because that’s the only way you can really enjoy it. That way you get a reputation for being long suffering and uncomplaining and you’re held up to the other patients as a shining light.

The nurses say, ‘Look at Mrs Powell, she doesn’t ring her bell all day long and she doesn’t ask us to keep doing this, that and the other for her.’

The fact that all the other patients get to detest you doesn’t matter because they’re not looking after you. It’s the nurses you’ve got to rely on for your comfort. So I never complained about anything. I just let it all happen to me.

Once I had recovered sufficiently to be able to walk around the other patients soon forgot their animosity because I did little jobs for them – like getting a jug of water or something out of their locker or bringing them their tea. And then patients are always dying to talk to someone about their home, their husbands and their children. Curiously enough I never found many patients wanted to talk about their operations or what they were in there for. Not then.

When they get home they do, but I think it’s too near to them in hospital. They try to pretend almost that it doesn’t exist. It’s rather like a conversation I once overheard between two women.

One was saying to the other, ‘Oh, I’ve got such pains in my stomach and I have to keep on taking these Rennies to relieve it.’

So the other said, ‘Haven’t you been to the doctor, then?’

She said, ‘No. I’m scared to go to the doctor because he might send me to the hospital and they might say it’s cancer.’

Well, the pain wouldn’t go away would it? But she thought that if she didn’t give it a name, it wasn’t there. And that’s how I found they were in hospital.

Although as I’ve said I kept quiet, before the National Health Act there was plenty to complain about in the public wards.

The meals were the worst thing. They used to be served on battered old tin trays with no cloth on of course, and as I was in there with ulcers it was mainly cod that tasted and felt like cottonwool. And the mashed potatoes had hard concrete lumps in them and were nearly always stone cold. You really had to be hungry to eat it. Mostly the sweet was a milk pudding and it was either so stiff you could have bounced it on the floor, or it was hard grains floating around in milk.

And when it was time for the bedpans the nurses used to deal them out on beds as you would a pack of cards. And there we used to sit parked on them, in full view of each other, and there was one toilet roll between four. And we’d throw it from bed to bed and sometimes we’d miss and it would roll down the ward like a large streamer. And we’d go into hysterics of mirth. It was the only way to accept the humiliation of it all.

That was my first stay in hospital and I hoped it would be my last.

But some years after, by this time there was the National Health Service, I discovered that I had a lump about the size of a small marble underneath my breast. I went straight to the doctor and he sent me to the hospital for an examination.

And what a change I found. You were treated as though you mattered. Even the waiting-room was different. No dark green paint, whitewash, and wooden benches. There were separate chairs with modern magazines – not the kind that Noah had around in the Ark.

They told me that I should have to have a minor operation for the cyst to be removed, but that I would only be in there about a week.

And again what a difference I saw. The beds for instance. The bed that I’d had before was like lying on the pebbles on Brighton beach. I got to know every lump in it and used to arrange myself around them. But now I had a rubber mattress. I felt as though I could have lain there for ever.

And the food was beautiful. All served on brightly coloured trays with the right cutlery. I remember one day I was waiting for my lunch when the matron came round; she saw my tray and said to the nurse, ‘Isn’t this patient having fish for her lunch today?’

And the nurse said, ‘Yes, Matron, she is.’

‘Well why hasn’t she got a fish knife and fork then? Change it instantly.’

I was amazed. I couldn’t have cared less because we hadn’t got any fish knives and forks at home. But that just shows you, doesn’t it?

And there was variety. I don’t think we ever saw the same meal twice in one week and that needs some doing. It just showed what kind of kitchen staff they’d got. Presumably under the National Health Act they could afford to pay them more wages than before. When I was in service you were considered the lowest of the low if you worked in hospital kitchens.

And every bed had got curtains and they were drawn not only at bedpan time but at any time you were attended to.

There was only one thing that was exactly the same and I suppose always will be and that is that neither nurses, house surgeons nor the visiting specialists would ever answer any questions about your condition. In fact they never stayed long enough by your bed for you to get the question out.

I think that a generation that’s brought up on Emergency Ward 10 and Dr Kildare must suffer great disillusionment when they go into hospital. In all the time I’ve spent there no doctor or house surgeon has ever sat on my bed talking to me about my complaint.

As for the specialists they don’t even look at you. They seem to stare right over your head. They frighten you to death. They stand there looking so stern you feel you’ve got every ailment under the sun and you’re not likely to last much longer and they’re weighing up who’s coming into your bed when you’ve gone.

And the nurses seem to think that along with physical deterioration goes mental deterioration. You get these young nurses saying, ‘Come along, Mother, be a good girl. Put your nightie on and pop into bed.’ As though you were suffering from senile decay and didn’t understand plain English. It riled me the way they did that. I hate being jollied along at any time, let alone when in hospital.

As I said, I went into this hospital to have this cyst removed from my breast and the night before the operation the Sister stuck a form under my nose for me to sign. I hate forms at the best of times and when I’d recovered from the shock I read it and discovered that I’d got to agree that in the event of them discovering that I needed major surgery I was prepared to have it done. At once I knew that they were going to slash my breast off otherwise why go into all this palaver if it was just a cyst.

So I signed – and I knew what it meant.

I wasn’t shocked when I came to after the operation and found I was bandaged up in miles of bandages. I knew it hadn’t been just a cyst.

I asked the nurse of course but she just said, ‘Go to sleep, Mother.’

But Mother knew. The nurse wouldn’t tell me because she felt I was going to suffer from the shock. But I’d suffered from the shock the night before when I read that form.

About a couple of days after the operation the house surgeon told me that they had found a tumour there and had to remove the breast, but that it was a non-malignant one and I would be going home shortly. It didn’t take me long to get over the operation and I was soon able to get up and help a bit.

We had some lively people in that ward. There was an unfortunate woman there who used to suffer with the most rude noises. She couldn’t help it. But when she let one go the patients would call out, ‘There’s a bomb just gone off, Nurse,’ and then a little later, ‘It’s all right, the all clear’s gone now.’

There was another woman. She was only in there to have her bunions done. She was a card if ever there was one.

She said to me, ‘This is the first time I’ve had a bed to myself for forty years.’

So I said, ‘Is it? It must be awful being separated after all those years.’

‘It isn’t,’ she said. ‘It’s bloody marvellous. Sharing a bed with my old man is nothing but sweat and swill.’

She said she wasn’t going back to sharing a bed, which shows that hospital life has a lot to answer for.

Some of the patients looked at me a bit queerly. They told me later that they thought I’d have delayed reaction emotion about losing my breast. But strangely enough I wasn’t ever really upset.

My mother was more. She kept weeping like mad by my bedside. But if you’re a young girl and you’re hoping to get married it’s a far more serious thing, isn’t it? You’d have to tell your young man and explaining it away would be a bit embarrassing. But I’d got a husband who I knew wouldn’t think any the worse of me because of it. And when they told me it was non-malignant I was quite happy about it. Naturally I would have preferred to have kept it. It wasn’t the kind of thing that I could chuck off and not know I hadn’t got. It’s not the kind of an appendage that doesn’t matter whether you have it or not. It’s not like your appendix. But no, I wasn’t too upset about it.

Then three days before I was to go home they came up to me again, put the curtains round the bed and I prepared myself for another shock.

In came the Sister this time. I’d always thought of her as a bit of a martinet. Mind you, you need a Sister that’s a martinet because the other hospital I was in the Sister was very strict indeed and I used to feel sorry for the nurses, but we realized when she went on holiday what a difference a strict Sister made to our lives because once she was out of the way the nurses didn’t care a bit. They used to laugh and joke and make the most terrible row and we never got half the attention that we had when she was there. But this one I’d thought was a hard woman – unfeeling – but what a change. She was kindness itself to me. She sat there by my bed for half an hour. She told me that they’d got a report back from the Marie Curie hospital in Hampstead that my growth was malignant and that I’d got to go there and have radium treatment.

It was only then that I really thought about cancer. As soon as she mentioned the Marie Curie I knew what the hospital was for so I knew I’d got cancer and I was very upset then for the rest of that day. I know I wept a few times to myself and that. The thing I asked Sister to do for me was to catch my mother before she came in to visit me and tell her because I didn’t feel as though I could. I knew she’d be terribly upset about it, which she was.

But strangely enough by next morning I’d recovered. I thought – oh, well, here goes. Lots of people go to the Marie Curie and they don’t all die. I mean if you’ve got to have cancer you couldn’t have it in a better place than in the breast because once you’ve had it removed most of it’s gone.

So by the next day I’d got over it and as I wasn’t due to go for a week I asked if I could go home. ‘No,’ came the answer. They wouldn’t let me go because they were frightened I wouldn’t come back. But after a day or two I got lively and me and this woman with bunions kicked up such a shindy larking around that Sister said, ‘All right, you’ve won, you can go home for the weekend but don’t forget to come back.’ Of course, I would come back in any case.

When I got to this Marie Curie hospital in Hampstead I found there were many far worse than me because they’d let it go such a long time before they’d been to a doctor, and it had spread and gone into an arm as well. So really and truly it really does pay to see a doctor in the very early stages because it never affected me in that way.

I used to go every day for radium treatment – just five minutes a day. It was in a little room that there was this sort of Heath Robinson contraption that hovers over you. You have to lie down and there’s a door about a foot thick, which is closed on you and of course I suffer appallingly from claustrophobia. I didn’t mind the radium treatment but the thought of being shut in that room was almost too much for me. But the nurses were very good. There was a little glass window and they’d look at me. But although it was only five minutes it seemed like half an hour and I’d imagine they’d forgotten the time.

Anyway I had six weeks of that treatment and then I went home. I had to go back once a month for the first three months and then once every three months and then once a year. I still do now although it was over ten years ago and I’ve never had a recurrence.

When I got back came the problem of a bra. The old bras I’d got were no good at all. The Marie Curie had given me the address of where to go for one on the National Health Service. Maybe now it’s a better model but at that time, believe me, it was pure stodge. An appalling pink-coloured thing, a cross between a liberty bodice and a strait jacket. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. I thought they would have tried to do something better than that. I mean just at a time when you feel mutilated and even though you try to laugh about it, you do feel mutilated, you’d have thought they’d have produced something artistic.

Well I accepted it because it was on the National Health but I didn’t wear it. I bought myself a pair of falsies and a bra to go with them. I only needed one falsie, but they wouldn’t sell them singly. There’s a waste of money. It was the cult of the huge bra a la Jane Russell and breasts was all coming in then and everybody was endeavouring to look twice the size they really were. So perhaps it was as well I didn’t get them singly otherwise I’d have looked unbalanced.

Of course wearing a falsie can be a very tricky thing. The first time I put a bathing costume on and went swimming I was very disconcerted to see it bobbing merrily around on top of the waves. I hastily stuffed it back but I felt awful. I don’t know whether anyone noticed or not but it was a pale pink colour and it looked most peculiar. Anyway after that I used cottonwool. I thought of buying one of those bras that you blow up and you’re provided with a little pump. I would only have blown up one side but then I thought it would be a bit awkward if I had a puncture. I couldn’t really carry a repair outfit around with me, could I? So I gave up that idea.

But though I joked about it then and joke about it now, losing a breast does something to you in a sort of psychological way. You never feel the same person again. Not to yourself. Maybe you seem the same to other people. In the beginning you feel degraded and then you don’t feel a complete woman any more. All right there’s things on the market to make you look the same externally but there’s nothing on the market that makes you feel the same internally.

But don’t let me make a big thing out of this psychological feeling. What I would say to anyone would be if they suspect anything like that is to go straight away to a doctor. Mine was only a breast operation – one amongst many, but I made a friend at the Marie Curie who was there for an internal cancer operation – and a very big operation indeed. She was in hospital for months, but now she’s out, she’s doing a full-time job in domestic service and she still only has to go in once a year like me. She caught it in what were the early stages and although the operation was a big one because it was internal it hasn’t spread all over her body. But I had a sister-in-law who suffered the pains and wouldn’t go in and when she had to it was far too late. If it’s caught early mostly it can be cured and even if you have to have the operation I had you can still live a very happy life.