The Bed of Dread

 

The hospice nurse ordered a bed for me last week, which arrived this morning. Once I saw it assembled in our lovingly designed, artful and peaceful bedroom, I must describe my emotions 

I enjoyed so much of my life as a medical student: the intense studying of the human frame, interacting with patients on the wards, even the surgery was fascinating, though I knew early on that I was not surgeon material – I was slow and uncertain and preferred to consider options rather than make rapid irreversible decisions. 

The nearest way I can describe that life in the mid-1960’s is as very close to Richard Gordon's A Doctor in the House, but more bizarre.  St Thomas’ Hospital was founded in about 1100 a.d. becoming a pilgrims’ hospital after the death of St Thomas a Becket in 1170. Therefore in 1970 it was decided that the students would put on a pageant to honour 800 years of its history. This was staged over the road in the grounds of Lambeth Palace in the presence of the Archbishop, and for the medieval pilgrimage some of the students brought their horses into London, parking their horse boxes on the palace lawns. The pageant enacted the traditional Chaucerian costumes, including original knight’s armour, and finishing with the founding of the nursing school by Florence Nightingale (St Thomas’ nurses are still called Nightingales).

Inevitably, many patients we were exposed to had esoteric diseases that we might not see again in a lifetime, so for my general medicine I opted to do a stint at Lambeth Hospital, a former workhouse but now a sister hospital. This included a short period on the geriatric ward – but this completely put me off that speciality. My nature is not blessed with an overabundance of compassion, and to see the ward filled with the incontinent, the dementias, the terminal bronchitics, and the generally insane was disheartening. The worst dementia patients were restrained by what I can only describe as “cages”: high-sided beds with a mesh over the top, to stop them climbing out and falling. Those beds were what I thought of when I saw this bed. It is hard, rigid, grey-painted iron with high walled ends and a thin plastic-covered mattress, and my mind flashed back to those poor unfortunates dying in the old workhouse at Lambeth.

My future now is short and inevitable, but I still anticipate living each day in the company of my wonderful Annie; gathering joy from the country air; meeting up with relatives and friends, getting out with the dog to walk by the river, or spending time on my cosmology hobby. All of this will be extended by my new scooter. 

But this bed brings an air of gloom into the house. It signifies one day less on the march to death; instead of anticipating each day, I feel it brooding and promising only day-by-day decay. I would rather die in beauty but discomfort, than in that ugly monstrosity, practical though it may be. That bed will have to go.