Get some rest, the surgeons said. They didn’t say much else that was any use. They stood together at the foot of the bed with a third surgeon. She didn’t say anything. In a word, my experience last week at Auckland Hospital was quiet. Many times when I asked someone for something, they walked away in silence. It was though they hadn’t heard or had heard but viewed it with supreme indifference. And yet they would routinely suddenly return maybe 10, 15 minutes later with the information I was seeking, or an approximation of the information. That was good. Follow-up questions were useless. They just walked away, never to return. I got used to the silence. I thought I was having a heart attack, and got rushed in by ambulance; a hospital is a waiting room between pain and recovery.
Get some rest, they said. They really needed better material. I felt bad for them, standing like there shop dummies, as mute and as useful, and asked questions that might reveal they were in fact men of considerable expertise in the subject of what had been removed from my body. One of them said the drip running out of my sides did not indicate any “sinister content”. Sinister content! That was good. Like what? “Serous ooze,” he said. Serous ooze! His colleague tried to get in on the act. His material wasn’t as vivid but I liked it when he said there was no damage at “source control”. Source control! Visiting a hospital is one of the few times in our lives when we are reduced to scientific fact.
Get some rest, they said. They looked as though they needed it as much as I did. They stood there with dead eyes. But they had the same quality about them as the surgeon who had operated on me earlier in the day. He said he was from Belgium. I tried to hold an interesting conversation about Belgium but no one has ever succeeded and I soon gave up, and took silent note of the quality he shared with the two surgeons who came to see me after the operation: they all looked like they made a lot of money. That was a rare sight among the dozens of orderlies, nurses, care managers and cleaners I came across. A hospital is a shocking model of the income gap.
Get some rest, they said. I had got rest of a kind thanks to my favourite drug of all time, propofol, the wonder anaesthetic with the beautiful reputation of being “milk of amnesia” - it’s in white liquid form, emulsified in soya bean oil and egg yolk, and looks like salad dressing. It has a high rate of easing the patient back into consciousness without any side effects. It’s so smooth, so efficient. It was first trialled in 1977, in Ghent, Belgium - if only I had remembered that fact in my desperate attempt to interest the Belgian surgeon - and introduced to New Zealand in the 1980s. It passes through the blood-brain barrier at fantastic speeds. But I think something sent me to sleep faster: the anaesthetist himself. He said he was from Bristol, and proceeded to talk a great deal about Bristol, even though he said nothing at all interesting about Bristol. Give me Belgium any day. A hospital is not a centre of great conversation.
