Life lessons from hospital corridors...

How can we cope when we never know what's coming next?

Welcome! I write about grief, of all kinds, from the traditional grief of losing someone you love, to the grief of our daily lives, drifting from friends, drifting from the person we thought we might be…

I interview people, open up the space for others to share their stories and I sometimes just try to ponder on my thoughts and try to untangle them. At the moment, I have a broken left-arm - and I’m left-handed so I’m using this time to explore new ways of writing…

The below is something I wrote in the notes app of my phone, during an appointment at the fracture clinic.

I hope you’ll enjoy being here.

Photo by Gonzalo Kenny on Unsplash

You are getting lost in hospital corridors, following blue footsteps one-way, green arrows the next... And the thing about being in hospitals is you must concentrate very, very hard on not thinking. You can't think about all the other times you have been in hospitals. No good can come from that.

You are anxious and annoyed at yourself, as you were 25 minutes late for your appointment as you cannot focus on the task at hand. You float about your days and don't pay attention, and you put the wrong destination into your CityMapper and… why are you so bad at being a grown up?

You feel like everyone is mad at you even though there's no reason for anyone to be mad with you. All you want to do is cry and that's silly because you don't have anything to cry about, not really. Yes, you have a broken arm and a bank account so in the red you couldn't afford to get here. But everywhere you look there are people lying in beds in corridors, their faces gaunt. There’s that NHS blue, a blue you know so well, reminding you that things could be a lot worse.

Why do we have to be brave all the time?

One of the things you think about so you don't think about all the other times you’ve been in hospitals is… when, at 3am, to the sound of techno music, you found you could not breathe. Your friend had been guiding you through the crowd by your shoulders and you, sharply and suddenly, felt completely out of control. Like your life and all of your movements were not yours at all. They belonged to someone else. This is how you feel now, a puppet in a mysterious game.

Why can we never know what's coming next?

You are shown your bones on a screen and this was the part you were looking forward to but you realise you don't know what your elbow looks like when it's healthy so the whole thing is an anti-climax and… then they tell you that you  need a CT scan and are you claustrophobic? Are you scared? You are not claustrophobic, but you are scared and maybe you’re not as brave as you thought you were. You want to cry again when you are back, lost once more in the corridors and an alien vending machine charges you £2.30 for a 7UP and serves it to you in a way as if it is your friend.

You used to want to be scanned, all the time, for someone soft and kind to examine you head-to-toe and tell you that nothing bad is ever going to happen to you ever again. But that's not really how these things work and now you are about to be scanned, you don't want to be. You want to lock yourself into your house and never leave it again.

Why are there so many different ways for us to hurt ourselves?

Everyone in the hospital is in pain but you all still smile at each other. You realise you smell of fresh sweat that's beginning to curdle as you slept on your friend's sofa, and you are still in the outfit you wore last night where you ate chunks of gooey birthday cake with your hands and whooped your support for strangers singing karaoke. One woman did an Adele song all about self-destruction and you complimented her on the lyrics of it, and she said "thank you, I thought you'd understand" even though this woman was not Adele, and she did not know you. Your ripped fishnet tights and cake-coated teeth perhaps told her everything she needed.

You think of this as you lie on a bed that moves you back and forth, up and down. The CT scan is like being in a washing machine. The man instructs you to put your hand up as if you are Superman and you have to explain you can't be strong like that, your arm is stuck in a L. He says, it's OK we will find a different way and you know that he means scanning your elbow but perhaps he also means there are other ways to be strong.

If you think about your life in percentages, how much time have you spent feeling hurt and how much time have you spent feeling joy?

You go back to the waiting room and there’s a little girl there, and she tells you she's going to get hot pink for her cast. So, when you get called and you're presented with all the colourful options, you go for hot pink too. The cast feels tight and when you move your arm it kind of gets trapped and you wish you could hold it high and Superman your way home. Instead, you wait at the bus stop, the little girl is beside you and her mum says “look twins” and you both shyly smile at each other. You realise you've done that so much in the past five days, when you waited in A&E and when you were lost in all those bed-lined, hospital corridors. You smiled and spoke to strangers, strangers who were often really, really scared.

You think of the nurse, who patted her patient on the shoulder and said “tomorrow is never promised, let's make the most of today...” You think of your past, you think of the people you'll never see again, you think how you hate feeling out of control but all you really are is out of control. You think yes, there are so many ways we can hurt ourselves, there are so many ways we can hurt each other.

And we do, time and time again, we do.

Yet haven't you just seen something miraculous? As when we’re all crammed, in hospital corridors, in waiting rooms with shiny plastic seats, time passing and holding no promise, cruelty would be so easy, and so understandable. But the majority of us aren’t cruel, or mean. Instead, we smile, we make small talk about the weather and in a very mundane way, in moments that are entirely unremarkable, we make the most of our today.

We make the most of our today.

An American lady I met who said I was her sister as we both had slings…

My pink sling