MATT HAIG

MATT HAIG

The Inside of Hospitals

I can remember the second time I cut my head open as a kid. It was bad enough for me to have to go to hospital in the back of an ambulance. I had always been fascinated by hospitals – by what happened inside them – as if it was something as mysterious as the inside of a Tardis. I had a big gash on my forehead and blood leaked over my face as if someone had switched on a tap. But I can’t remember the pain. The only thing I remember was the nurse holding my hand and asking in soothing tones about what I wanted for Christmas as the stitches went into my skin.

‘Table football,’ I winced. ‘And a Liverpool kit. That’s what I want.’

Within a year, I would be nine years old and would arrive at the realisation that I didn’t really like football as much as I thought I did, but right then I had successfully convinced myself that everything was better if it had ‘football’ in front of it. The nurse smiled and asked my mum how likely that was, and by the time my mum had answered the stitches were done.

I can remember the anaesthetist, three years later, when I was eleven, who chatted to me before an operation. I told her I hadn’t dared tell any of my friends I had to have it done as it was quite embarrassing to have, you know, your foreskin chopped off. And she smiled with comforting irreverence and said she didn’t know as she had never had her foreskin chopped off.

I can remember visiting my eighty-four-year-old nan, night after night, following her last surgery as she lay slowly dying of breast cancer in a ward on the third floor of Newark Hospital’s austerely Victorian building. I can remember my nan’s bittersweet chuckle with her kind and jovial doctor as she asked if he was flirting with her.

I can remember my other grandmother, my dad’s mum, in a hospital bed in Sussex, dying of so many numerous ailments it was hard to keep count. I remember her being more worried than my other nan, more aware of her own fate, her eyes saucer-wide. The nurses sensed this too and chatted with her tenderly, as if they knew words themselves were a vital ointment.

I can remember being an idiot at a New Year’s Eve party when I was sixteen years old and drinking far too much cheap cider and standing too close to an outside fire and the wind changing. I can remember explaining to the burns consultant – as he gazed down at the large, fresh, oozing, multi-shaded purple wound on my left thigh – that I had been wearing two pairs of trousers as it was a cold night and so I hadn’t noticed the outer layer was on fire until too late. ‘You must have drunk a lot of cider,’ he told me, without too much judgement.

I can remember seeing that same burns consultant – Richard, he was called, like my dad – only a few months later, for an even more stupid injury. This time my mum had asked me to see if one of the hobs on the stove was hot and, instead of acting like a sentient Homo sapiens and checking the temperature on the dial, or at least hovering my hand above the heat, I actually placed said hand directly on the hob. And such was the heat, my brain didn’t translate it as heat for a little while so my hand stayed there for a few seconds until it was too late and my entire right palm was in a state of hot, pulsating agony, blistering in real time as I ran it under the cold tap for an eternity and then walked around to the hospital with my mum, in my pyjamas. Richard knew what to do. He lathered my hand with some magic cream and placed it in a transparent glove which I had to wear for a week, before returning to see him so he could transfer my hand into a bandage. ‘Now,’ said Richard, poor bloke, smiling a tired smile, ‘promise me you’ll stay in on Bonfire Night, yeah?’

I can remember wandering around a maze of hospital corridors after the birth of my first child, dazed and euphoric and bewildered, eventually helped to the car park by an off-duty doctor.

I can remember my wife, Andrea, bleeding and nearly going into premature labour at twenty-three weeks with our second child, and the consultant obstetrician – after effectively saving my unborn daughter’s life – gave me a stern look: ‘Your wife must stay in bed for seventeen weeks and you will have to do everything, do you understand? You are her personal butler!’

‘Yes. I understand.’

I can remember the kindness of the oncologist at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Gateshead who was treating my mother-in-law for ovarian cancer, and chatted to her about garden centres. The pleasant triviality of the conversation as welcome as rain on the savannah.

I can remember my dad, coming around after twenty-four hours of unconsciousness after nearly drowning in a lake, on so much morphine he sincerely thought he was in the afterlife.

I can remember my mum, two years ago, in the intensive care ward after having open heart surgery to replace her aortic valve. She’d also had morphine, but instead of it causing her to imagine she was in heaven, she had felt she was about to be experimented on in a sinister laboratory and was now feeling a bit embarrassed about how she may have acted in front of the ICU staff. Not that they seemed fazed in any way. In fact, they were lovely. One of the porters made sure the window opposite my mum had the blind opened fully, so that she could see the sunshine and sycamore trees beyond, which cheered Mum up immensely.

I can also remember last week, when Andrea chopped the tip of her finger off with a kitchen knife and the blood wouldn’t stop. We tried everything. We wrapped it up with kitchen roll. We grabbed a bag of frozen sweetcorn. We placed it over her head (the finger, not the sweetcorn). But nothing. An hour later and it was still bleeding, and we called 111 and – despite the fact we were one week into lockdown and hadn’t left the cocoon of our house for anything more than to take the bins out or the terrier for a walk – we now had to go to A&E. With a bandage around her leaking crimson finger and a scarf around her face, Andrea went in to see the triage nurse. As the nurse cauterised Andrea’s finger, Andrea asked if he was worried. ‘About what?’ the nurse asked.

‘You know. The virus.’

‘Of course. But you just get on with it, don’t you?’

And I remember this A&E department was part of the same Sussex hospital my worried grandmother died in years ago. I remember how she had been comforted by the nurses who had sat beside her and held her hand and spoken and listened, alongside their other duties.

‘They are ever so good,’ she told me. ‘They really are.’

And the nurse in the room had just waved it away as if it was nothing at all, before leaving to gently attend to another duty.

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