Therapy

be in the unlucky five per cent.
     
    I had the operation done at Rummidge General. Being a private patient I would normally have gone into the Abbey, the BUPA hospital near the cricket ground, but they had a bit of a bottleneck there at the time — they were refurbishing one of their operating theatres or something — and Nizar said he could fit me in quicker if I came into the General, where he works one day a week for the NHS. He promised I would have a room to myself, and as the op entailed staying in for only one night, I agreed. I wanted to get it over and done with as soon as possible.
    As soon as I arrived at the General by taxi, at nine o’clock one winter morning, I began to wish I’d waited for a bed at the Abbey. The General is a huge, gloomy Victorian pile, blackened redbrick on the outside, slimy green and cream paint on the inside. The main reception area was already full of rows of people slumped in moulded plastic chairs, with that air of abandoned hope I always associate with NHS hospitals. One man had blood seeping through a bandage wrapped round his forehead. A baby was screaming its head off.
    Nizar had given me a scrap of graph paper with his name scrawled on it, and the date and time of my appointment — a ludicrously inadequate document for admission to a hospital, I thought, but the receptionist seemed to recognize it, and directed me to a ward on the third floor. I took the lift and was told off by a sharp-faced nursing sister who stepped in at the first floor and pointed out that it was for the use of hospital staff only. “Where are you going?” she demanded. “Ward 3J,” I said. “I’m having a minor operation. Mr Nizar.” “Oh,” she said with a slight sneer, “You’re one of his private patients, are you?” I got the impression she disapproved of private patients being treated in NHS hospitals. “I’m only in for one night,” I said, in mitigation. She gave a brief, barking laugh, which unsettled me. It turned out that she was in charge of Ward 3J. I wonder sometimes if she didn’t deliberately engineer the harrowing ordeal of the next hour and a half.
    There was a row of black plastic chairs up against the wall outside the ward where I sat for about twenty minutes before a thin, drawn-looking young Asian woman, in a house-doctor’s white coat, came and wrote down my particulars. She asked me if I had any allergies and tied a dogtag with my name on it to my wrist. Then she led me to a small, two-bed room. There was a man in striped pyjamas lying on one of the beds, with his face to the wall. I was about to protest that I had been promised a private room, when he turned over to look at us and I saw that he was black, probably Caribbean. Not wishing to appear racist, I swallowed my complaint. The house-doctor ordered me to take off all my clothes and to put on one of those hospital nightgowns that open down the back, which was lying folded on top of the vacant bed. She told me to remove any false teeth, glass eyes, artificial limbs or other such accessories I might be secreting on my person, and then left me. I undressed and put on the gown, watched enviously by the Caribbean. He told me he had been admitted three days ago, for a hernia operation, and nobody had come near him since. He seemed to have dropped into some kind of black hole in the system.
    I sat on the edge of the bed in my gown, feeling the draught up my legs. The Caribbean turned his face to the wall again and seemed to fall into a light sleep, groaning and whimpering to himself occasionally. The young Asian house-doctor came back into the room and checked the name on my dogtag against her notes as if she had never met me before. She asked me again if I had any allergies. I was rapidly losing faith in this hospital. “That man says he has been here three days and nobody has taken any notice of him,” I said. “Well, at least he’s had some sleep,” said the house-doctor, “which is more than I’ve had for the last thirty-six hours.” She left the room again. Time passed very slowly. A low winter sun shone through the dusty window. I watched the shadow of the window-frame inch its way across the linotiled floor. Then a nurse and a porter pushing a stretcher on wheels came to fetch me to the operating theatre. The porter was a young local man with a poker-player’s pallid, impassive face, and the nurse a buxom Irish girl whose starched uniform seemed a size too small for her, giving her a