In cubicle 15 we wait patiently and simply take in the orchestration of pain that is being performed around us. Machines emit urgent sounds of alarm and other rudimentary chimes – a rhythmic pulse shows they are working as they should, a frantic fortissimo has the attendant nurse rushing into cubicle 14. In 16, the iterations of pain are never-ending, until the cadence finally comes in step with a gentle to-and-fro of pain and machine, human and robot, cries in 16, bleeps in 14, urgh-urgh, bip-bip, and all I can do is look at my agitated friend and smile.
We are not, by a long shot, urgent cases. But then again, who among the hypochondriac Maltese might be, in this miraculous temple of national healthcare welfare? I surmise, with my untrained eye, a couple of chronic complications, broken bones, and many elderly patients with nowhere to go. I place myself in the centre of the plaza near the medics’ desk, to watch the emergency nurses entering and exit the surgical theater where some poor soul must be fighting for their life. What might it be? A knife wound perhaps, maybe a dagger lodged firmly into the head, with the victim surviving the worst thanks to the one-in-million chance of a clean entry with no major vital impact... a stout, short woman in green scrubs emerges from the room and walks intently to the central desk, demands some item, and returns to that door of unimaginable pain.
All pain here comes in aches and shouts, but you will only wonder at what bodily abomination these unfortunate souls are enduring. “Piss in here, otherwise I’ll get you the catheter,” says a harried nurse to the difficult patient in 14. Just get on with it mate... God, I’ll be here too one day, refusing the catheter and all sort of dreaded cannulas with their life-saving fluids passing inside me.
We’ll be thinking of it as the worst day of our life as we finally come bursting through those blue doors on a stretcher, aged what? Maybe 70, 75, 80... first left to wait for hours in the waiting room, a sputtering engine on its last legs, being seen to by unknown doctors and nurses, spoken to in the condescending language of care, a love we never asked for but financed unquestioningly with our taxes – the apex of democratic civility – so that we can have the most dignified form of exit from this vale of tears. Patients here seem to have only one look on their face here. Astonishment. Vacant staring at the blue curtains and neon lights that illustrate this most unwelcome detour from their plans. I guess everyone opted for the quiet death in your sleep.
These doctors and nurses, they are just like mechanics. They know what to fix. But there might be at least 40 different patients every hour or so. Zen-like they move gently from one cubicle to the other, carrying out tests, making their quick diagnoses, fetching other doctors, taking a breather by simply sitting down on a chair, clocking a 12, 20, 24, a 36-hour shift... Thank you for your service Ms, Dr... Yes, you’re most welcome. But we will always be just a blip in this stream of humanity that passes through here, with our only record of existence the chain of referral forms that instruct the next doctors on the care we ‘deserve’. And so be it.
What might they think of us? Do they ever consider us as ungrateful usurpers, those who squander so many healthy life years in processed meats and sugars, the sedentary pursuit of salaried wealth, in blind abandon to our drug-addled weaknesses, self-medicating our sorrows, accursed by ignorance of the blissful kind to the choices we should have made... do they ponder on the frailty of the human body when their fingers thrust into the soft, pale, jaundiced skin of their elderly patients, clutching firmly at this last, emaciated expression of life just as its breathless egress renders us nothing but bodily husks of flesh and bone? Or are they just pleased to get on with their job and have a go at our bodies, to be fixed and be made happy again, so that we might go through life blessed by the second-chance luck of modern medicine?
In come two porters through one of the emergency doors pushing a stretcher bed with a woman, aged 45, 50 at a stretch... there is a look of catotonic despondency as she holds what looks like a paper note on her, spelling ‘HD’ in printed letters. Then as they edge closer to me, I realise she is holding a Health Department paper bag, and I can see traces of sick all over her herringbone jacket... a Sunday lunch where too much drink must have got the better of her. At the central desk of nurses and doctors I have been staring at for almost one hour now, the banter is light-hearted and business-like. All the while, they pop in to one cubicle or the other, where that polyphonic opera of pain plays out in a sequence of crescendos and staccato cries. I hope the medics are having an easy Sunday shift.