In the Midst of Life

corners were awkward, but they did not question my instructions.
    Not an hour too soon, we moved him. Two days earlier he had been sitting upright in bed, leaning forward a little, his cheeks flushed, his lips tinged blue as his chest heaved tumultuously at four times the normal respiration rate. His eyes had been clear and his mind alert, as he noted people and things going on in the ward. Now the struggle to live had departed, and weariness had overtaken him.
    I called a junior student nurse, and showed her how to fix up the oxygen and the sucker, and how to use them, and explained the details, which were so much better than ten years previously when I had been a student nurse. I told the girl (she was barely more than a child, with fresh features and the downy skin of youth) to stay with the dying man whilst I went to fetch the injections. What huge responsibility we place upon a nurse’s shoulders, I reflected, as I went to the dangerous drugs cupboard. So often they come straight from school, the classroom, the hockey field or the gym, and we expect them to remain with the dying, a task that the majority of mature people would run away from in fear and revulsion. Does this give nurses a heightened sensibility of living, to be so closely acquainted with death? Certainly, nurses always seem to be full of life and vitality, with an inexhaustible capacity for laughter. I had found in nurses none of the lethargy and self-absorption that one often noticed in young girls, contrary to what one might expect, given the nature of ourwork.
    Radiotherapy could not help the malign growth in Mr Waters’ lungs. It may have halted the progress of the cancer by a hair’s breadth, but it made no real impression on the inexorable course of the disease. Mr Waters had smoked himself to death, and there was nothing that medicine could do to reverse the destruction. For two days he flickered in and out of consciousness, his lungs bubbling and gurgling as he slowly drowned. But his suffering was not as great as appearances suggested, because he received devoted nursing care – and the Brompton Cocktail every four hours. His mind was not conscious of his condition, or of his surroundings, and he showed no signs of pain. We did not try to bring him back from wherever he was, by forcing him to drink this or to take that, nor any of the multifarious futilities of energetic medicine. His perceptions were so dimmed by weakness and weariness that his life was ending slowly, in a dream state, rather than in true awareness.
    Each morning when I came on duty I expected to find the side ward empty, but for two mornings he was still there. How extraordinary is life, that one can hang on in that condition, neither alive nor dead? But on the third morning the room was empty, and the night nurse reported that the flickerings of life had given way to the smothering curtain ofdeath.

FAMILY INVOLVEMENT
     
    Mr Elias Roberts had an enormous family, which seemed to expand with each passing day. They were Jamaican and had immigrated to England in the early 1950s, seeking a better life, better education, and better prospects for their children. They had stepped off the boats in their Sunday best, raw and hopeful, into an exhausted and war-torn England. A better time was a long way off. Jobs were plentiful because rebuilding Britain was a priority, but finding somewhere to live was near impossible. Mr Roberts had eventually found a single room at the top of a derelict house for himself, his wife and their two youngest daughters, but the older boys and girls had had to make their own way.
    Mr Roberts was admitted to the Marie Curie Hospital suffering from prostate cancer, which had been treated by prostatectomy in the Royal Free Hospital. He had come to us for radium treatment but the widespread metastasis in the bones was clear evidence that the treatment had come too late.
    When I was a young girl, I was told that men who had difficulty urinating carried a catheter coiled in their hatbands. When they needed to pass water, they catheterised themselves. At first, they would inevitably develop an infection, but the body’s immune system is built to fight that, and once these men had got over the initial bouts of infection, the body became immune to the germs lurking in the hatband.
    Testing for cancer was not routine. Some men went to a doctor, but the treatment was fairly rudimentary – diuretics, potassium citrate, no alcohol, barley water – none of