Page 2 of The Flowers of Bay C
‘On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the highest, what would you say your level of pain was?’
The question crashes into my foggy mind. What is my level of pain? My eight might be someone else’s four, my five might be someone else’s ten. How do you quantify pain? I think back to when I was in labour with Jake. I would have given that a sure ten. But this is a ten too, just a different kind of ten. This is a ten without joy at the end of it, without the hope of it being over soon, without my body knowing what to do with it. This is a sharper ten, a ten that might crush me into tiny little pieces.
My pain is lots of colours, but they are all harsh ones. A purple so deep it is the depths of blackness, a bruise of despair. A red so bright it slices me open. A green so bitter it clinches me into spiky embraces I do not want.
Fifteen and a half, I think.
‘Eight,’ I say.
He writes it down. ‘Okay, so I have your x-ray here.’ He shows me the tablet, tracing his fingers over the image of my messed-up lungs. ‘You have a pneumococcal infection here, you see. Both lungs. I’m afraid we’ll have to keep you in a while. We’ll get you started on some IV antibiotics.’
I try to find words. I could reel off the drugs and the dosages, the times they should be administered, but fog wraps up the words and smashes them away. I squeeze my eyes closed.
He clears his throat and I force my eyes open, force myself to focus on his face, all floppy hair and black-framed glasses, a blur of youth and newly minted authority, a fight between arrogance and uncertainty.
‘We’ll start you on one gram amoxicillin.’
I shake my head. ‘No.’
He grips his clipboard tight, his shoulders rising and falling, as if he is weary of patients who tell him that they can do this better than he can, as if he knows that he needs to learn bedside manner but it’s sometimes just too hard.
I swallow and my throat is choked with razor blades. ‘Not that.’
He frowns at me and then glances at my notes and starts flicking back through the pages and murmuring words to himself. I know he’s going to tell me what I’ll have now, as if it’s his idea. It’ll be tobramycin that makes you tired and sad, once a day for fourteen days. And then ceftazidime that tastes like rotten onions in the back of your throat as it sears through your veins, three times a day.
‘Right.’
I close my eyes as he collects up his notes and his ruffled dignity and shuffles away to another poor weary patient who probably won’t argue with him about medication.
‘We’re just taking you to Ward Nine, Mrs Fielding,’ someone says. A porter in blue scrubs with a hipster beard and a rainbow lanyard. It’s Miss, I want to say to him. Not married. Not anymore. But I don’t want to think about that, because it might make me sink and I have to hold on.
Edna squawks as he wheels me away. ‘Where’s the eighteen-year-old going? Where are you taking her? I need her.’
She’s leaking bewilderment as the porter wheels my bed away, tears creeping down hollowed-out cheeks. I turn my gaze away, longing to be more for her.
The temperature drops as we push through the acute medical unit doors and into the long hallway. This is the Victorian wing of the hospital – an infinite corridor, harsh strip lights surging above. I can’t breathe. I see Jake’s trainers kicked off by the front door at home and wish I hadn’t wasted so much time nagging him to clear them away.
We stop at a set of lifts and wait. The hipster porter hums a tune I vaguely recognise, tapping his feet. Somewhere in the bowels of the building a clanking, grating sound starts up, as if the lift has woken from a hundred-year slumber. It arrives with a sulkyhiss that sounds like Jake’s grumbles when I make him do homework. Doors opening, the automated voice chants, the doors crawling open with a suck of air. Doors closing. Lift going down.
‘Here we go,’ the porter says, pausing at double doors and buzzing the intercom. He shifts from foot to foot and rubs his hands together as we wait.
A nurse looks up as we enter. Ward Manager, it says on her badge. Official dark-blue tunic and trousers. Weary piercing eyes. I know her.
‘Where for Mrs Fielding?’
She glances at the electronic board behind the nurse’s station, then points down the hall. ‘C Bay. Be there in a moment.’ She looks more closely at me, and I see the usual recognition sweeping through her eyes. ‘Oh, it’s you again, turning up like a bad penny!’
That’s me. Bad Penny. Waste of space Penny. Drain on the NHS Penny.
She flushes. ‘Oh! I didn't mean… I forgot.’
The porter turns and grins at me, working gum fiercely around his mouth. ‘You look tired. You get any sleep up there?’
I shake my head.
He makes a wry face. ‘Ward’ll be quieter, love.’
The ward isn’t quieter. A machine that sounds like a jet engine in trouble squeals from Bed 4, a cacophony of beeping wails out around the bay, and all the lights are on. ‘Has no one put these lights off?’ No one answers him so he deposits my bed in the middle on the left side, and strolls out, waving. ‘Hope you feel better soon.’
