One has only to start up a conversation with any group of women around our way lately to learn that Maureen isn’t with us today because she’s gone into hospital for a scrape. Or poor old Milly’s womb is on the move again. Or Pam’s tubes are under observation. Or unravelling. Or being fitted up with a loop line.
And it isn’t just we ordinary mortals who have our little bit o’ female trouble. A beautiful, glowing girl with slumbrous eyes and peachy cheekbones was only telling me the other day that no sooner had she found the perfect man of her dreams than she had to pop into hospital to have a piece snipped off the end of her coccyx. Next came a crop of boils on the lower slopes. Then an operation so delicate I’m still not quite sure what it was or whether it was successful.
‘My God!’ said her Dreamboat as she lay once more bandaged and bottoms-up. ‘We all have our problems but do yours always have to be down there?’
I, too, still blench at the distant memory of a ‘down there’ check-up at a large teaching hospital. I didn’t mind too much that I lay surrounded by jostling medical students. They have to learn, I kept telling myself. I didn’t mind the prodding specialist. I didn’t even mind all those peering doctors and assorted nursing staff. But I did mind the woman in the flowery apron, leaning on her floor mop.
Our menfolk, too, have their troubles. While the older ones are busy being braced up, strapped down, held in or poked back into place, younger chaps are making their own brave decisions. Like the poor devil I heard of who chivalrously agreed to a vasectomy.
‘Nothing to it!’ everyone kept assuring him. ‘You just pop in – quick snip – all over!’
Perhaps he chose a bad day. Because, as he tells it, while the pre-snip brigade sat around in the waiting room being noticeably nonchalant and witty and debonair, the first man was wheeled out in a dead faint. As you can imagine, the ensuing silence was deafening.
With children, of course, visits to hospital need particularly careful handling. When Anna was small, our nearest hospital was a crumbling, grim old place known locally as ‘The Bastille’.
‘We’ve only got to pop in and have your chest X-rayed,’ I kept saying brightly as we approached. ‘I bet it’s super inside. You’ll see. All flowery screens and toys and kindly nurses.’
‘Card!’ snapped a woman with inflamed nostrils as we followed the trail of arrows. ‘In there. Strip off. I’ll call you when we’re ready for you.’
‘In there’ turned out to be a small medicine cupboard already containing an elderly lady down to her bra.
‘Oh, I’m sorry, do excuse us,’ I stammered.
‘That’s all right, dear – they’re very short of cubicles here. We often have to double up.’
So we doubled up – or in our case trebled up and thrashed about together as politely as we could. I should perhaps mention that this cupboard was also the telephone kiosk. And the phone kept ringing. And people of assorted sexes kept squeezing in to answer it.
‘Why aren’t you undressed yet?’ rapped old fiery nostrils suddenly flinging open the door and staring at me accusingly.
‘Er – it’s my daughter, not me,’ I mumbled. ‘Nonsense,’ she replied. ‘Look on the card. Age fifty-six!’
We did eventually convince her that our doctor had meant five years and six months and that I was a much younger woman, anyway. But it put us both off hospitals for a while, especially crumbling ones ruled by short-tempered dragons.
I wasn’t too happy about the follow-up, either, when dozens of us sat squashed into a very narrow, hot passageway awaiting the X-ray results.
‘Will Mr Ramadam please report to Ward C immediately,’ said a slightly panicky voice over the tannoy. And the small, feverish Indian gentleman sitting right next to us leapt to his feet and stumbled off – coughing, coughing all the way.
It would only be fair to add that this particular hospital subsequently had some much-needed new buildings added and that, over the years, I’ve also met some very good hospital staff – and some really super ones; particularly one night nurse who was such hilarious fun that several of us used to stay awake to enjoy her jokes and antics.
‘Can’t understand why you lot always seem so pale and tired,’ the perplexed day staff would remark.
And let us not forget that they do have to cope with a richly assorted cross-section of humanity, to say the least. Like the well-intentioned friend of mine who dashed into her local hospital to give a pint of blood. As other donors will know, they prick the thumb first for a blood sample.
‘I say, do you mind if we try again?’ they said, looking faintly worried as the first two jabs failed to bring forth any blood at all.
At the third attempt a teeny pallid dot appeared but refused to coagulate.
‘I don’t think we’d better take any of your blood, my dear,’ they said with a wry smile. ‘It looks as if you could do with some!’
Or take my own last stay in hospital when it seems I proved just a shade allergic to their brand of Mickey Finn. It wasn’t every day, they said, that an unconscious patient was wheeled out of the operating theatre sitting bolt upright and singing hymns (and I didn’t even know that I knew any).
Ah well, amid all the snipping and stitching and looping and scraping they deserve their occasional moments of light relief.