Drug addicts and alcoholics who have wilfully buggered their livers, rise from their beds and leave the Unit after a fortnight. Is there a moral here, or have they just buggered their immune systems as well? We don't know. Later there are tears. It's probably just the drugs, though I don't recall taking any. Anyway, the doctors will juggle the antirejection drugs again, to try and fix the problem, or maybe slow the process, who can say?
It seems unreasonable to lay this stuff on others just now, so we have a
nice birthday anyway. There are cards and printed emails from all over
the planet. Visitors arrive with gifts and cakes. Yum! The new liver,
ironically, works just fine. Nothing is off the menu any more.
Even the staff enter into the spirit of things. They reschedule sticking needles into Joc. The Dragon Lady smiles. Did I mention the Dragon Lady? An unsmiling matron of obscure European origin, with a voice like Paul Robeson. She cleans the floors, delivers the meals, brings the tea.
Woe betide those who get up her nose. Their telephone conversations will invariably be conducted to the deafening whine of loud floor-polishers. Their tea will be cold, their gravy congealed. Complain and she will steal your toilet-paper. Nurses hide and doctors fawn - and she did not like me.
Then one day she burst in to Joc's room to sieze her half-eaten dinner tray, and found me on my knees wiping spilt stuff from her gleaming floors with a paper towel. Far from despising me as a craven invertebrate, she told Joc I was a 'good man', unlike her worthless idle husband who would not even take his dirty plate to the kitchen sink &c.&c. Joc gets to finish her dinner now. Sometimes as I am fumbling ineptly with bunches of flowers the DL snatches them from me, muttering, arranges them and thrusts the jar silently back into my hand. We gave her a big slice of chocolate kugelhopf.
The chaplains kindly popped in with a nice birthday card. A mental picture of Leah looking wryly at Joc's sticky ID label pops into my mind. It says something like:
NEWMAN J 20-10-47 1235679 JEW
Joc told her the form field wasn't long enough for 'ISH'. I guess it's not long enough for 'LIM' either. The Ethiopians next door must think we are human at last, with all the visitors. The staff despairingly re-site and rearrange the silly notices which say 'Strictly two visitors per patient', while a vast tribe of colourful relatives wander about day and night, rearranging the beds and furniture, cutting up giant watermelons with surgical instruments, and generally failing to recognise the existence of an Institution.
And an Institution is what it is, make no mistake. A place of mindless routine, where they will wake you to give you sleeping tablets; where if you need an injection every four hours, and your blood pressure taken every four hours, you can be sure no-one will synchronise anything, and you will get a maximum of two hours sleep. A lot of things are blamed on lack of dollars, but it seems hard to pin this sort of stuff on funding.
On the other hand, after months of none or one liver transplant, suddenly there have been six in five weeks. Of course we understand that they cannot produce donors out of a hat, but there are rumours of funding increases. It is an election year. We the election-fodder know only what they choose to tell us, of course. Then again, we don't live in Bali, or Afghanistan. It is all relative.
Joc, the glass-half-full person, is her usual optimistic self. I try not to be the half-empty one, but at best succeed in being the-bloody-glass-is-twice-as-big-as-necessary. Nonetheless, in the spirit of leaving no stone unturned, I enclose the following link to an abstract, provided by a friend. I know that the conclusion will be quite unremarkable to many on this list.
http://archinte.ama-assn.org/issues/v159n19/abs/ioi90043.html
Love, JH.