In the Midst of Life

these – my wedding ring, and thelikeness of my lovely lad. He was nineteen when we were married in 1915, and two months later he marched off to the war. Oh, I can mind him still, waving and smiling, and marching off.’
    ‘Did he come back?’
    ‘No, he never came back. Smiling and waving, he was. But my lovely lad, he never came back.’
    The clock ticked on the wall, and the evening sun cast long shadows through the window. Traffic could be heard in the street, but in the day room no one spoke. Fifty years of love, still burning after only two months of marriage, could be felt by all the women.
    Then Mrs Merton spoke again.
    ‘When I got a telegram saying “missing presumed dead” I knew he was gone for ever. I cried for two years, and for ten years I ached all the time. All the time –just here.’ She put her hands up to her chest. ‘Here it was, the ache. It was terrible. Terrible it was, far worse than the rheumatics.’ She chuckled and looked around her. ‘Rheumatics is nothing compared to the pain of losing your only love. A great wound, it was, open and bleeding just here.’ She pressed her hands on her chest again. ‘I can’t explain the ache, the feeling, but it was there all the time, never went away, ten years, the ache, ten years…’ Her voice trailed away.
    There were sighs of compassion among the ladies.
    ‘Wicked it was – half our lads gone.’
    ‘War’s a crime, I say.’
    ‘My aunt lost four sons.’
    Mrs Merton spoke again, her bird-like features eager. ‘And then, after about ten years, something happened. I can’t explain it, but it did. One morning I woke up and – d’you know what?’
    She looked around brightly. We shook our heads.
    ‘No. What?’
    ‘The pain was gone. Quite gone. The wound had healed over, and my Bert was there inside me.’
    She hugged her chest protectively.
    ‘Here, inside me, my Bert with his forget-me-not eyes.’ She chuckled. And I’ve never been alone since. He’s always inside me, laughing and waving, and marching off.’
    *
    Two weeks later a tragedy occurred that nursing staff always dread, and which usually happens so quickly that nothing can be done to prevent it.
    Mrs Merton never wanted to be a trouble to anyone. She was not consumed by fierce independence as some people are, but with self-effacing humility. ‘You girls have got people more sick than me with my rheumatics to look after. I can manage fine. I’ll not be bothering you,’ she would say.
    I knew that it was not really safe for Mrs Merton to walk alone, but the alternative would have been to confine her to bed with cot sides around her. This was bad for a patient, both mentally and physically. It deprived them of self-respect and dignity, and was often the start of an almost infantile dependence on the nurses, which frequently hastened the end, quite apart from the fact that it usually caused acute unhappiness. I have seen patients rattling their cot sides in impotent rage and frustration, shouting or weeping, which can have a terrible effect on the morale of other patients in the ward. If the disturbance got too much, I have seen narcotics being given to quieten the patient. This is bad medicine, and bad nursing.
    I decided that Mrs Merton should be at liberty to wander around as much as she wanted. In retrospect, this was the wrong clinical decision, but so often in medicine decisions have to be taken, and it is not until later that one can say if they were right or wrong.
    One afternoon, Mrs Merton was going into the day room for tea when the diseased bone of her femur snapped. She fell and shattered her pelvis and was taken to the orthopaedics department at the Royal Free for surgery. The femur was pinned and plastered without too much trouble, even though the bone was riddled with cancer, but the fractured pelvis was another matter. It was diseased and shattered in several places, and bits of jagged bone threatened to penetrate her internal organs. The surgeons did what they could, but the result was that the pelvic bone did not mend, and the external wound never healed, as the stitches could not hold the muscle together. Suppuration started around the surface, but itmust have been spreading beneath the muscle, because suddenly the whole wound opened up, exposing bone, tendons, ligaments, and muscle, all sticky with pus. The wound was so deep and so extensive that you could get your hand into it.
    We did our best. We gave antibiotics to try to reduce the