The technician came out of her room and bellowed a name at us: ‘Andrew Parkinson!’ There was silence as we all looked at each other sheepishly. Apart from myself, all the other people waiting in the hospital corridor were elderly women, some of them from the wards and wearing dressing-gowns. ‘Andrew Parkinson!’ she shouted again, this time fixing me with an accusatory look. ‘John Launer?’ I asked guiltily. She looked again at the form in her hand. ‘Bloody hell,’ she said, ‘I’ve already done Andrew Parkinson.’ She disappeared, and came back a minute later with another form. ‘John Launer!’ she bellowed this time, as if I might have changed my identity in the meantime.
I went into the room to have my electro-cardiogram done. She told me to strip to the waist and announced she was going to shave some small areas on my chest. No introduction, no preliminaries, no questions, no explanations, no friendly chatter to put me at my ease. ‘Get up on the treadmill… I’m going to stick some pads on your chest… start to walk… now faster… Jesus!’ She had just seen my initial reading coming out of the printer. Immediately she tore off a length of it and scurried off without another word. I could hear her anxious conversation with the junior doctor on the other side of the curtain. I wasn’t very surprised when she came back to ask me if I had ever had an abnormal reading before.
It was still an odd question. My notes were in front of her, stuffed with my previous electro-cardiograms. ‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘I’ve got left bundle branch block. I’ve had it all my life.’ Incurious about my use of the technical term, she scurried away once more for another half-whispered conversation behind the curtain and then returned, apparently reassured. ‘I’m a doctor,’ I added – mainly to satisfy an inner need. I certainly had little expectation that it would lead to a change in her manner. She started to press buttons and the treadmill gathered speed each time. After a while I asked her if it was OK to run, as I was accustomed to jogging and found it more comfortable than having to walk very fast. She said I could, but a few minutes later she commented on how much I was perspiring, especially for someone who was used to jogging. It was a very hot day, and there wasn’t a fan in the room. I refrained from pointing out that someone coming for a stress cardiogram to find out if they possibly needed heart surgery might, just conceivably, be perspiring from anxiety, even without a technician whose gift for empathy was small.
As I gathered speed, she told me that my shoulders seemed unusually tense. This was interfering with the tracing, and anyway they shouldn’t be like that if I exercised regularly. I asked her how much faster the treadmill would go, and she told me there wasn’t a limit. She then waited another couple of minutes before giving me the information I obviously wanted, namely whether she would stop before I got exhausted. Finally she did turn the treadmill off and I could see (by squinting sideways) that the tracing didn’t appear to show any new problems. I asked if she agreed. ‘Which consultant are you under?’ was her response. I gave his name. ‘He’ll tell you at your next appointment. Here’s a towel for the sweat. You can put on your clothes now, we’re finished.’
The experience was excruciating, a needless act of emotional abuse where kindness would have required little effort. It was also, I suppose, no more or less cruel than thousands of such encounters that occur every day in the health service, not just with technicians, but with doctors, clerks, or just about anyone with a degree of power to exercise who lacks insight – whether for a passing moment or a whole lifetime – into what it feels like to be the other. We all have our explanations for such behaviour. They include multiple failings at the collective level: in the department, the hospital, the health service, and the nation. We also have our own preferred prescriptions for the problem, such as better pay and conditions, improved team morale, enhanced training, attractive incentives, consumer choice, becoming a more compassionate society, and so on and so forth.
The philosopher Martin Buber taught that we all live with a two-fold attitude, which he called the ‘I-It’ attitude and the ‘I-Thou’ attitude. ‘If I face a human being as my Thou,’ he argued, ‘he is not a thing among things, and does not consist of things.’ In the same corridor as the technician, there is a secretary who is outstandingly helpful, although presumably she shares many of the same work conditions as the technician. I know her name, her direct line and her email address. She always remembers my name, what I do, who I am seeing and why. When I contact her, she seems to operate from the premise that my request is going to be reasonable and that she will try her utmost to make sure it is met. I believe she treats everyone else in the same way. Without the active will, and the moral choice, of people like her, I suspect that all the well-meant interventions of politicians, managers and educators to improve the way patients are treated will subside into mere noise. Or to put it in Buber’s words: ‘All true living is meeting.’