“She’s had a fall.”
She did not trip over a kerb, or bump into a lamppost, or try to avoid a killer cyclist. No, it was a genuine old-lady, out-of-the-blue, sudden crash to the ground. I have for some time battled with an irregular heartbeat, which, according to my clever watch, pirouetted between 40 and 160 beats-per-minute. My all-purpose timepiece kept warning me that my heart rate was too high or too low, and I did nothing. Maybe fed up with being ignored, it suddenly gave up and stopped completely. My heart, I mean.
The first I knew about it was waking up and finding myself flat on my face on the kitchen floor. My watch was now rather sadly stating the obvious: “It looks like you have had a fall”. I agreed, and asked it to get me an ambulance, to which it did not respond. I could see my phone on a counter a few feet away. All the patient, technical training my grandchildren had given me went out of my head. I crawled painfully towards my phone. “Why didn’t you just use Siri, Nana?”
I don’t remember much of what happened until three super-efficient paramedics, a frightened daughter and a friend arrived to whisk me off the hospital. It being a Sunday followed by a bank holiday, there was no one to sort me out at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, so we sped across to the one in Hammersmith, next door to some friends I have residing in Wormwood Scrubs. There I was strung up to lots of drips, and forbidden to stir from my bed lest I pass out again.
My main worry about this was the impossibility of dealing with bodily functions. This I shared with the desperate, demented man in the bed next to mine, who held forth night and day about people not letting him go to the toilet. Nothing would convince him that he had already been. His anguish was desperate. I wondered what childhood bedtime routine was surfacing as he laid dying. I wondered if my own unease stemmed from my first night of evacuation from the Blitz when, at eight years old, I soiled the cracked leatherette sofa that was to be my bed in my billet.
The young nurses treated the frantic old man with devoted care. As they did me. I lay there immobile for three days under close observation: “Lie down Sheila”, “Relax Sheila”, “No, put your foot back in the bed”. During that time, I watched professionals from diverse countries of origin, deploying their incredible skill and dedication to snatch us from the jaws of death. They held the hands of a 93-year-old woman, the demented dying man and his devastated family, and even a huge, bearded strongman who had injured himself in a stage act but did what he was told by the tiny, 20-year-old student doctor that took care of him. We were a little community intent on healing. The sense of that mutual support reminded me of being in a film or television show, where a shared purpose can unite people with an intense love for a short period of creativity. In those moments, the outside world ceases to exist.
It helped that all the staff in the hospital seemed to be incredibly beautiful. The consultants, of whom I saw many, included one handsome woman and three stunning men, all committed to puzzling out my treatment. When I was young, before the National Health Service was formed, people from my background seldom saw doctors. If you did, you wore your Sunday best and—I seem to remember—they wore white coats, with stethoscopes around their necks. This lot at Hammersmith wore tight jeans and trousers with designer shirts. They looked as though they were regulars at the gym.
They all studied the multiple screens showing my misbehaving heart and involved me in discussions. This contrasted with the doctors of the past, with their old-fashioned muttering about the patient out of their hearing. Eventually they put a miraculous gadget in my chest that will make my heart behave, and thus they have given me a few more years to try and change the world. There is much to do. One of my ministering angels told me she is nervous going home after a late shift, especially when the far-right activist Tommy Robinson leaves his tax haven to favour us with a visit.
In the enclosed world of the hospital ward, such impressive young women are respected for their skill and kindness. Back in the real world, they are rewarded for their care with mindless hatred. It breaks my heart.
