The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part
‘East Coker’ TS Eliot
Four months after beginning the process of referral for a
hip joint replacement, I find myself queuing in the seven o’clock winter dark
to gain entry into the stark electrically-lit room of the Hallamshire hospital Theatre
Admissions Unit. A small gathering of a quietly
tense cross-section of Sheffield’s population sits clutching small over-night bags, waiting for the call.
We are summoned and trail along down a windowless corridor into an
area, seemingly a cross between a concrete colon and an airport docking system
with large green panels marked on the floor with numbers for each curtained
bay. I find myself in number 38.
This is not a private environment: just flimsy green cloth curtains
offering visual privacy. However
pre-operative mini-consultations with a steady stream of health care professionals are anything but private.
The lead surgeon offers a cheery welcome. The junior doctor (complete with 'support the junior doctors strike' lanyard badge), registrar and anaesthetic
teams, alongside the ever present theatre nurse all conduct their necessary conversations with all those of us in the bay. It becomes unavoidable: personal stories will not be private.
A sort
of priestly call and response ritual follows between registrar and patient: ‘Can you
tell me what you are having done today?’ ‘I’m having a hip replacement’. Next the
junior doctor lays the arrowed stroke of a thick black marker pen down my left leg. Then questions and accounts from
anaesthetist, ensuring nil-by-mouth procedures have been followed. The long wait begins, but with some relief that this
is the ‘kairos’: the time is coming after several months of counting down to ‘it’.
Whatever ‘it’ is will arrive in the passage of a few small hours.
Directly opposite me sits a man in his eighties, with his
wife, his present and long-time companion.
He has tumbled over on his entrance to the Theatre Admissions Unit in
the dark, having lost the use of his legs and been accidentally tipped out of a
wheelchair. So the bridge of his nose below his glasses is painted with scarlet drips of
blood, patched temporarily with a simple plaster. I am struck by the interactions between this
elderly man and his accompanying wife, the practical utterances of a
lifetime’s togetherness punctuating the quiet waiting.
In another bay opposite me a man in his thirties sits calmly
and waits with kind cheerfulness and consideration alongside his partner’s
unspoken tension. He faces an all-day brain procedure. The surgeon, a tall, willowy and ascetic
looking man, has a more extended
discussion with him and his partner, explaining the probable length and
outlining the meticulous complexity of the operation in language which renders
the whole calmly factual. The tumour lies embedded deeply and requires a slow excavation of absolute precision. There is an
unspoken kindliness in this calm professional manner. The man, a father, a husband, receives it with
calm, cheerful politeness. I see him walking down the corridor with the
nurse and anaesthetist attendants: ‘you get off now, love. It’ll be ok’, he
says to his tense partner. There is something about this undemonstrative
vulnerability and courageous vulnerability that applies an invisible surgeon’s knife to those like me who
are able to observe: ‘the distempered part’ is opened up.
By my side a man acknowledges his drinking and smoking,
acknowledges the vulnerability of the loss of his wife. He makes it apparent that he and his bereaved
friend minister friendship to their grieving parts over pints and crushed tabs. He finds himself sitting here awaiting a
spinal procedure to relieve his pain. It is the other pain that opens up the observer.
What strikes me about all these professional -patient
interactions is the way they have a ritualised manner, rendering them
impersonal. Yet underlying the
professionality of all this is an understanding by all involved in the care
that there is an underlying human ministration to that which is unspoken,
unuttered in each one of us as we face an unknown in the hands of strangers
with mysterious skills, skills we entrust ourselves to.
The elderly man who has lost the use of his legs, the man in
the prime of life facing the removal of a brain tumour, the man whose body
seems wrung out by grief, and me, a late middle-aged man awaiting the removal
of the bodily discomfort of an arthritic hip:
all of us are brought together in all our extraordinary human
ordinariness, our vulnerability, to this
strange fellowship of the sick.
The unspoken that lies like an invisible thread connecting
healer and sick, feels luminous. I feel
as if I will walk again pain free, but with a part of me opened up to another
light, to live perhaps a little more fully.
