Manger danger

There are days when you worry about the state of the Manx NHS. And then there are other days when you really worry about it - especially when it caves in to pitchfork-waving simpletons stirred up by priests.
Which isn't to say that all clergy contact with the health service is negative. For example, when the bishop spouts guff like this (see http://www.isleofman.com/News/details/68929/bishop-bemoans-political-correctness ) I know at once that he doesn’t talk to his own hospital chaplain, who probably put the display up in the empty chapel as usual because he actually knows and respects the beliefs of hospital staff. In my dealings with the last generation of hospital chaplains on a committee, I also knew them as three tolerant, kindly lads with definite party lines but prepared to understand and work with others to the common good.
But the island's hospitals have always been a little, well.... rustic compared to UK equivalents, and it did take years of effort just to get things relatively scientific. Even five years ago I knew of a superstitious senior hospital official who never took a major decision without consulting her priest. Thankfully, he was slightly more worldly than she was, and I gather talked her out of a few schemes straight out of Lourdes.
Sadly, those wise old heads are now retired, and their replacements are either under orders from area management to concentrate on rich invalids or just from Christianity's lunatic fringe anyway. In addition to one replacement (the one who stirred up the nativity scandal) being a sectarian fright, representatives of the island's freak sects (formerly kept at bay by hospital staff) now freely roam the corridors looking for victims.
All of which makes this (see http://www.isleofman.com/News/details/68928/it-s-humbug-health-chiefs-dispel-nativity-decoration-rumour ) somewhat inevitable.
What next? Homoeopathy, “services of spiritual healing” .....leeches ....... exorcisms?
Laugh if you like, but two of the above are already on tap at the island's semi-privatised hospice (a centre of spiritual excrement, sadly, ever since its unfortunate conception), so not quite the plot for a black comedy starring, say, Mark Gatiss that it ought to be.

Public health notice

Some regulars have been asking where the hell I've been lately (though they put it more politely).
Sorry about that. In addition to the usual unavoidable engagements with 'real life' I decided it was about time I updated my ancient PC, and thought I'd picked the best time, when I'd be able to deal with any teething troubles.
Ha!
Inevitably all my troubles only began towards the end of the handy slot for solving them, and have dragged on ever since. Hopefully now behind me, but as a few likely stories and topics have been and gone while I was kicking my heels I'll post a current one before things can go pear-shaped all over again.
Check http://www.gov.im/news/2013/nov/13/west-midlands-quality-review-service-presents-its-review-approach-to-tynwald-members/ , which was posted on the government website on Friday afternoon. Usual tactic when a government department wants a necessary announcement (but potentially awkward to them or useful to critics) to be missed.
Note in particular:
“As well as the announced meeting with Tynwald Members, each WMRQS review visit will include meetings with groups who can represent the views of patients and carers who use the services being reviewed and meetings with patients who have used the services recently. Questionnaires will also be available in the relevant service areas, which patients and carers can use to tell the reviewers about their experiences. These questionnaires will also be available electronically. Guidance for the public has been developed including how WMQRS will engage with patients, carers and relatives.”
In short, an external independent review is needed to silence all the local grumbles. In order that it says what the Health Department need it to say they'll do their best to make sure the only members of the public who can comment are their tame 'patient and carer representatives'.
If you are a genuine, independent member of the public who wants to at least try and get your experience or views to the independent reviewers, you are going to have to either go up to Nobles and wander around until you can find a questionnaire or keep a look-out for it on the government website, probably tucked away somewhere under either the Health Department pages or the Public Consultations page.
Good Luck with that.

Of sock puppets and empty spaces

One New Year’s Resolution I quickly broke was to get serious about this blog and manage at least a weekly update.

Well, “get serious” might be the wrong term, as one of the few things I’m serious about is not taking anything or anyone (including myself) too seriously, but apologies anyway for an inexcusable break in not-so-serious service.

Another resolution was to disturb ‘business as usual’ for local sock puppets and fake charities.
For those who haven’t explored such arguments, ‘sock puppets’ (see http://www.iea.org.uk/publications/research/sock-puppets-how-the-government-lobbies-itself-and-why for the definitive study) are ‘independent’ agencies which take government money and, quite coincidentally, produce reports and campaigns which validate policies the government had always intended to carry out anyway. Take, for example, the ‘independent’ survey into end-of-life care carried out last year by the employee of one major recipient of government funds which neglected to gather ‘evidence’ from any agency which was not, and which would not benefit from continuing the current mess.
‘Fake charities’ are an older and wider variant on this, and are typically registered charities taking at least half of their income from government. What they have in common is both totally depend on government to perpetuate their existence, and both would collapse if there was genuine public scrutiny or audit of their policies, methodology or performance.

So it was interesting to see this publicity on a government website (see http://www.gov.im/lib/news/health/macmillancanceri.xml ) for an 'independent' charity offering (in theory) services the government is paid to provide. Because, oddly enough, I  remember when that space was going to be a quiet room for non-Christian visitors to the local hospital.

When the hospital opened, devotees of the Zombie Carpenter made sure there was a lavish hospital chapel, on the dubious basis that troubled patients and relatives needed a quiet space to pray. Interests representing the other 95% of the population quickly pointed out that, actually, most religiously minded staff are Muslim or Hindu and couldn’t even do their devotions there, while any non-religious troubled person would just vomit in a room decked in naff Christian art.

The cheap compromise was a broom cupboard near the entrance with the legend ‘quiet room’ hand-written in blue biro on an envelope blu-tacked to the door. Then a business consultant employed at great expense by the hospital (and coincidentally romantically involved with a leading civil servant, now retired and and a hobby vicar) suggested giving this ‘under-used’ facility over to Macmillans.

Quite why  the much larger, better appointed but equally empty hospital chapel wasn’t offered instead I never quite understood. Obviously, all those experts on cushy government contracts (with their little clickers to count visitor numbers and calculators to calculate ‘cost effectiveness’) never did the analysis.

Perhaps they were just late for church elsewhere. Or perhaps we just need another set of consultants to calculate if the first lot are a cost effective use of public money

Job done

Today I had a unique experience. I was part of a government committee set up to plan for a potential disaster which has sacked itself, because the plans are in place and they work. That has to be a first.
Even more of a first – all clergy involved did a sterling job. Mind you, they were professional clergy, not hobby vicars, and as we gave up our lunchtimes voluntarily for the committee meetings and nobody was giving money away there were no evangelicals.
We were the Isle of Man Flu Pandemic Ethics Committee, a mixture of health professionals and lay people (including three clergy) with an interest in ethics, and we met at Nobles Hospital bi-monthly for two years. We put in place the ethical structure for Manx health services dealing with what, originally, was expected to be a serious bird flu pandemic but, in the end, was a much milder swine flu outbreak.
In the Isle of Man no-one has died, all who need a vaccine or treatment will get it, and the hospital has robust policies to continue dealing with those with high priority medical conditions without losing beds or staff needed for flu emergencies, now or in the future. As nothing has gone wrong there will be no screaming, but, between you and me, when we took the issue on it was an uphill battle against politicians going round with their eyes closed and fingers in their ears.
I’ve only once before been involved in such a scenario over here, and that was a disaster which caused me to approach this one with low expectations. In the other case the committee were the puppets of social services and their friends in evangelical churches.
The end result of that is the social problem we were meant to eradicate now gets worse day by day, because once the sham committee moved aside at the sham meeting to launch the sham solution the bigots and parasites at the root of the problem took over, and will continue to claim they’re solving it until the cash runs out. Frankly, that day might well be the first one when the problem starts to go away.
But that was another committee. This one restored my faith in some public sector workers (though as an ex-nurse I’ve always trusted health workers), and in the genuine good intent of the few old fashioned clergy still about. Modest types who got into the job to help people, not to lecture them senseless.
The lesson, I suppose, is that honest folk with good will can head off a disaster. But if you ever do find yourself in a position where you might have to, first avoid all involvement by evangelicals, civil servants or politicians. Do that, and you might get the job done right, and without wasting time, money or materials.

Swells party piece

I only discovered yesterday that while I was in hospital recently an old friend was in another one, in a far worse state, and had died.
Steven Wells, possibly the most in-yer-face hack ever to work in the music press, finally popped his clogs in a US hospital on 24th June. Knowing Swells, he was probably more annoyed at dying in America than that he was dying at all.
I first met him way back in 1982, when I tried to bring ‘Seething Wells’ over to Belfast for a gig, along with fellow ranting poets Joolz Denby, Attila the Stockbroker and Wild Willi Beckett. It fell through, but I was so intrigued by this unlikely Bradford skinhead poet that I stayed in touch over the years. A couple of years younger than me but sharing all my background experiences and constraints, he was like the mischievous little brother I never had.
Somewhere I have his recipe for roast police horse from Attack on Bzag ( the fanzine he started with James Brown), his article on raizing the Globe Theatre to the ground to build a skateboard park and many other outrageous delights. As others have said, Swells didn't write just to annoy or disturb the comfortable, but to cut through crap and force fierce argument about things he deeply cared about.
A few years ago, he even contributed to the campaign to abolish the Manx equivalent of Section 28.
Way back in 1992 he was doing PR for Manic Street Preachers and sent an open letter to Pope John Paul, Axl Rose and numerous other homophobes suggesting they dress in sackcloth, wear a sign around the neck reading ‘UNCLEAN’ and ring a bell to atone for their sins if appearing in public. The ridiculous image, and attitude, stayed with me and when a Manx politician (currently responsible for transport though unfit to even direct traffic) suggested the ban shouldn’t be repealed because homosexuality ‘causes diseases’ , I asked Swells if I could re-use his challenge.
Typically he said "Go for it" and I did, in the local paper. After the campaign, I never found out if the politican involved, on resigning as Education Minister, really did receive a school bell as a parting gift from his staff. I do know it was suggested.
What I also didn’t know then was that while e-mailing me Swells was fighting lymphatic cancer. He never bothered to mention it.
Swell later wrote about that experience at http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/news-and-opinion/cover-story/the_english_patient-38416404.html. He not only countered all the irritating touchy-feely hogwash about disease and charities that leech off the terminally ill he hated as much as I do, but set me up for my own hospital encounters this year.
A few months ago the cancer came back, and Swells topped his previous outrages with http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/news-and-opinion/Cell-Out-42215357.html and
http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/news-and-opinion/in-extremis/Steven-Wells-Says-Goodbye-49054426.html, the last things he wrote.
Damn you Swells! You couldn’t even die politely.

Angelic image, no earthly uses

It’s not often you see me backing a Manx clergyman, but I had to agree with Rev. Phil Frear’s letter in this week’s Indie (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/your-letters/Manx-Independent-July-3-2009.5425361.jp).
For off-island readers, the background to this was a court case to decide if one of those flashing ‘20’ signs outside schools constitutes advice or a legal instruction to motorists. Apparently it cannot be legally enforced.
But Phil’s one of the good guys, as I know from his work as the Nobles Hospital chaplain. It was Phil who, while not budging over the chapel, tried to open up hospital chaplaincy and religious input to the hospital in general to ‘all faiths and none’.
Sadly this offer hasn’t been taken up fully. Is this because NHS clientele are more downmarket than the departure lounge of choice for wealthy Rotarians, the Hospice?
I once took advice from Phil’s predecessor on setting up a hospital visiting scheme for us heathens. Unfortunately it seems our interest in self-determination becomes total disinterest when elderly, infirm atheists are under the weather.
When I tried to raise the matter the feeling was that we should leave ‘that sort of thing’ to the social services. If none of my fellow local heathens noticed that there aren’t any that might be why we’re not picking up new members; perhaps the current ones are too detached from most Manx people.
But this disdain for cash-strapped pensioners or folk from sink estates isn’t peculiar to atheists. The Interfaith Group and all ‘minority faith leaders’ listed on the government’s website or in the phonebook were scrupulously added to the faith community ‘guest list’ by public health officials when they were first advising on flu pandemics. Only the Interfaith lady turned up, and even she drifted off to ‘another appointment’ within 20 minutes and was never seen again. Similarly my offer to liase on health issues in future with minority faiths through the Interfaith Group was never taken up.
Meanwhile it seems every flakey fakir is setting up tent to flog crystals and other mumbo-juice at the Hospice. This, of course, cannot be because any dodgy potion or prayer you flog to a terminally ill person can handily be said to have ‘helped’ whatever happens, but will never be said to have contributed to the death of someone who would die anyway, with or without supplementing the quack’s (sorry ‘alternative therapist’s’) bank account.
A clergyman I know jokes that a parishioner once said to him: “You’re a real angel, but you’re no earthly use to anyone.”
I used to prize that as a description of bumbling vicars; it now occurs to me that it applies equally to many others.

Preying on the sick

Interesting piece yesterday over at The Freethinker website about godbothering doctors ‘defending’ the right to pray over (or is that prey on) patients.
Knowing from recent experience how little time most doctors (or health workers in general) have for such twaddle I was puzzled by both this and a Telegraph article on the same theme until discovering an earlier BBC report (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8116497.stm) which makes it clear it is the Christian Medical Fellowship, not the medical profession as a whole, dragging us back to the era of prayers and leeches (or priests, as they prefer to be called).
Having seen how this mob hijack conferences of overworked doctors and manage to pass ludicrous ‘motions’ (yes, aware of the pun, but the CMF will always be crap without moral fibre to me) things become clearer.
By the way, from the BBC report I also suspect Dr Birtwhistle may well be a ‘cancer specialist’ in the hospice movement, which revolves around faith, aromatherapy and plastic smiles rather than rational medicine. If you have a rational bone in your body, never EVER allow yourself to be cajoled into dying in one of their hellholes.
In contrast, my experience of hospital doctors is of overworked folk stacking up the hours to keep surgery lists down. When they find a little time to organise outside that it's to lobby government to keep essential public services going, not inessential publically subsidised prayers. In turn this makes me wonder - I'm well aware many CMF members are retired or private sector doctors out of touch with NHS realities, so are the rest just underemployed skivers who need to be cleared out of the public sector?
In my recent troubles I could no longer be bothered arguing with godbothering health workers who offered to pray for me. I just said 'Well, if it makes you feel better...'.
The point is, some folk say it quite innocently and just mean they're thinking of you, which isn't worth winding them up about. The more calculated ones know such 'prayers' are totally for their own benefit, not yours, so I let such professional victims know I realise that without giving them a chance to nail themselves to their silly crosses and whine.
But it doesn't suprise me that, knowing they can't produce solid facts and figures, godbotherers are stirring up pseudo-issues to protect public subsidy of their underemployed clerical chums instead.
But if there ever is talk about making the hospital chaplain part of the 'care plan' I suspect some interesting figures will be revealed. Presumably, to do it properly, they'd have to make 'chaplain's notes' which would become part of the patient's ward records, time, length and content of each visit recorded, and all this would be on the public record in, say, a negligency hearing.
This would make it immediately obvious that they spend little or no time with even the folk they're asked to visit, and that much of a chaplain's work is just consoling grieving relatives and facilitating early release of any body they expect to bury. Undertakers don't get paid to do this, and I'd argue that it's no more than a parish priest's usual job, so why not go the whole hog, stop paying for 'professional' hospital chaplains and tell the churches to sort out their own support services for sick members, like the rest of us already have to do.
Of course, on the Isle of Man this is already the case and the NHS provide a hospital chapel but not funding of chaplains, and that example stands up to scrutiny as ‘good practice’ for elsewhere.
As I’ve mentioned here before, I sit on a hospital committee representing 'other faiths and none' along with three full time clergy who are the 'official' (though unpaid) hospital chaplains. In two years my attendance (unpaid in my work lunch hour, any extra hours away from the desk to be made up in unpaid overtime) equals the three of theirs combined - I've only missed one meeting.
So I suspect we will never get this twaddle from Manx clergy and they will never try it as a local campaign. They do little though perfectly effectively in their way for those who request their help. They also know that, if it came to a survey, most hospital staff would reveal they suffer an imposition by outdated cultural custom rather than appreciate any professional input to the patient 'care package'.
As I witnessed last week, it is also not unusual for a vulnerable regular member of a church congregation to lie in hospital near death and unvisited, because nobody thought to ask where he is when his pew was empty for a month. So much for the closeness of Manx churches and the current ‘third sector’ arguments for more public funding of ‘faith based community work’.

A Call To Wierdness

Well, I’m back, and I write these words sitting at my keyboard with a chest more full of holes than a tea strainer. Today I am truly holier than thou, so grovel, sinners!
Last Monday morning I had my gall bladder removed. Being a wimp I was all ready to lie about on a hospital ward for a few days, but they kicked me out within one to make room for worthier cases.
Amazing things gallstones, by the way. The surgeon presented mine back to me in a specimen jar. It looks like I’ve eaten someone’s gravel drive.
So, after a few days watching the e-mails mount but truly not knowing or caring what in the world’s going on any more it seemed time to re-engage with this madness.
I needed to break myself in with something cheerful but stupid, so I went to Jeremy Clarkson’s Sunday column at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/jeremy_clarkson/article6590133.ece and that was just what I needed. As well as agreeing with his central point about the relative merits of hippies and Catholic clergy this article usefully reminded me of other things.
Back in 1992 two fellow Manx reprobates brought off a spectacular practical joke at the Stonehenge Solstice. In those days both police and army presence was stronger at Stonehenge, officially due to English Heritage’s need to guard the stones against ‘vandalism’, but many a stoned cynic thought because a damn great party of broken down vehicles got in the way of massive military exercises, such as playing with Cruise missiles.
My fellow deviants dressed up specially for the solstice, but not in druid costume. Sadly, they never got it filmed, but somewhere on an old police VCR even now I’d guess a few coppers are creasing themselves watching Wiltshire’s fattest chasing a pantomime cow round and round the stones like a demented Benny Hill sketch, overseen by several billion quid’s worth of spy-in-the-sky military hardware.
Yes folks, it can be done. This world may be run by all-powerful lunatics, but with a fair sprinkling of humour and imagination ordinary folk can hit back. As the late and great Dr Hunter S. Thompson used to say: “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
Thinking this through, the tragedy is us Manx oddballs get this stuff together off-island, but when we come home we get serious. A couple of years back I was so shocked by the claims of Liberal Vannin ( a Manx political party named after liberals but so clueless they took advice from a UKIP reject) to be the biggest party here that I proposed a branch of the Monster Raving Loony Party. The idea was sign up more members than Liberal Vannin, so that internationally the island would be on the map because self-confessed lunatics outnumbered people with serious political ambition.
It would have been possible, but once I contacted the OMRLP I lost interest. I knew them in the days when Bradford’s Wild Willi Beckett ( roller skating nun, psychosurgeon and all round anarchist muckraker) made enough waves to actually get Yorkshire candidates elected… and even do serious work on issues like homelessness. Sadly, the current OMRLP are more like a Rotary night out than a lunatic fringe.
But then I saw my wife creased double with laughter at a Hungarian news website. Hungary needs laughter, having just allowed fascist throwbacks to get the balance of power due to lack of support for dishonest conventional politicians (sound familiar?). So all power to the Two Tailed Dog Party, who recently organised a ‘political demonstration for nothing’, where any party line was absent and the ensuing clash of slogans on placards had to be seen to be believed.
I can’t find a site where you can get an English language translation of those events, but you can find an English version of some of their antics at http://mkkp.hu/indexangol.html. You can also follow the links to these and other inspiring folk via ‘joke political parties’ at Wikipedia.
Read, laugh, and then go and do thou likewise unto the huddled masses.

Quacks, prayers and naff art? No thanks!

An invitation on the government website (see http://www.gov.im/lib/news/dhss/rewardingrecogni.xml)
to find out more about hospital volunteering is making me quite ill. Really!
I have nothing particular against hospital volunteers. I’ve never met anyone they’ve helped myself - the ones who sit near the Nobles Hospital entrance to act as hospital guides, for example, never know where anything or anyone is.
But I’m sure they do good for somebody.
The thing is, if you skim through the press release straight to the end (where they list the speakers and advertise the inevitable church service) this is nothing but a list of the wrongheaded organisations and ideas that make any hospital visit a nightmare.
For instance, have you SEEN the bland junk they pass off as public art in hospitals?
Even Manx artists, most of whom couldn’t flog their tat in an Oxfam closedown sale, see the Healing Arts Programme as a conspiracy against taste and decency. Anyway, as Quentin Crisp always said when asked what had he got against art, ‘What have you got against bare walls?’
And don’t get me started on the cancer industry, as typified by the Macmillan goons.
After the DHSS included a chapel in the new hospital without bothering to ask anyone if it was needed (or what form a religious room should take if it could be shown it was), and as the Christians wouldn’t share their ghetto with anyone else, there was a campaign for a neutral place where anyone could go for a spot of peace and quiet instead. A store room near the entrance then had a sign reading ‘quiet room’ sellotaped to the door for about a month. That was the full extent of the information campaign, or attempts to meet needs of those of other religions, such as the predominantly Muslim medical staff.
Then a ‘management consultant’ coincidentally involved with twonks who ‘treat’ cancer with plastic smiles and aromatherapy intervened. The store room immediately had shedloads of public cash wasted turning it into a Macmillan Care ‘Information centre’ (read ‘begging bowl with carpets').
Yup. Volunteer to make me a nice cuppa when I’m twiddling my thumbs on a hospital ward in the near future and I’ll thank you for your kindness. But if I only have one life (which I do) I’ll be quite happy if I can lead it totally free of bad art, religion and interference from clueless pseudo-professional parasites such as cancer charities.

Health care, or just preying on the sick?

April 9 was the final day in the USA for public comment on a proposal to rescind an ugly faith-biased health regulation, the "provider conscience rule", which slipped in right at the end of the Bush era.
It’s a nasty little get-out clause for superstitious bigots which permits health workers at hundreds of thousands of federally funded clinics to refuse to provide health information and services related to abortion and other procedures they find objectionable. For example, an emergency room doctor at a federally funded hospital could claim the right to refuse rape victims information about emergency contraception, if doing so would offend the doctor's beliefs.
Crucially, there is no provision for considering and addressing the impact of such refusals on patients, and it doesn’t require the clinics to ensure that women receive essential health information and care despite the bigots in question.
There is also no provision for exceptions to the rule or other alternatives in the case of a need for lifesaving procedures or other emergencies, and the regulation does not require a referral to another employee who does not object and can carry out the procedure.
You can find out more courtesy of Human Rights Watch at http://www.hrw.org:80/en/news/2009/04/08/us-rescind-regulation-jeopardizing-women-s-health.
While in theory things are more flexible in the UK, in practice it’s something you still need to watch for –especially here in the Isle of Man.
I’ve already blogged on religious prejudice blocking Manx access to pregnancy termination (see From Third World to Romania, with ignorance), and in addition I strongly advise anyone rational and terminally ill to avoid the local Hospice. From experiences relayed by various friends the chances of anyone dying there in a way which doesn’t suit certain faith-biased bigots are non-existent.
Frankly I expect nothing anyway from a place which juggles Manx charitable and ‘independent’ health status in order to avoid the common decencies you’d expect at a pukka public health facility. But sadly this twaddle is spreading to the Manx NHS too.
In theory, while living wills have no firm legal status here because there is no Manx equivalent to the UK’s law on mental competency, living wills are recognised as ‘best practice’ and NHS staff expected to respect them. Yet only three months ago I am reliably informed a woman who made such an advance directive well before showing the first signs of dementia had her wishes blatently ignored by un-named NHS staff, who must have included at least one consultant. Her directive was supported by her immediate relatives, yet someone determined to ‘save her life’ by inflicting an invasive procedure on her phoned through a long list of relatives until finding one prepared to agree with ‘the expert’, not the woman and those she chose to take difficult decisions in the case of her inability to do so.
It is a troubling case, and I’m assured all decent senior Nobles staff were disgusted. Sadly, under current circumstances, the chances of ordinary Manx people being safe against medical decisions based on religious bigotry being quietly implemented by a few NHS staff are slim. Yet one more area locally where church claims to ‘moral authority’ or even 'humanity' have to be unmasked as nonsense and abolished if we are ever to get decent public services delivered.

Traa Dy Liooar

You’ve probably been wondering where I’ve been for two weeks.
The short answer is – mostly lying flat on my back with a drip in my arm, staring at a hospital ceiling while blissed out on Pethidine. I got rushed into Nobles early morning 3rd March, was allowed home last Saturday night and rushed back in to Ramsey Cottage this Tuesday after a relapse.
Lacking Jade Goody’s pathological self-belief that the public must know every time she cracks carcinogenic wind I don’t think you need to know about my medical maladies in detail. Suffice to say that anyone who thinks previous opinions on my blog could verge on the bilious need fear no more. Within a couple of months (hopefully) my body’s bile storage facility is due to be removed – surgically. This is the new, gentler, me......
sorry, just watching a pink elephant float past... hello flowers, hello fluffy bunnies.....
I got home again yesterday and am now looking bemused at two weeks worth of e-mails. With luck I may even remember which button is which on my devil’s typewriter long enough to reply to some and/or get this up on the blog.
That’s the trouble with industrial strength painkillers mixed with an enforced stay in hospital. They take you to a place where you can contemplate your role in the grand scheme of things, sans all the distractions of work, family and so on: but by the time you’ve floated back to earth you can’t even remember where you put your pen and notebook, never mind the marvellous insights.
How did Julian of Norwich cope with such practical problems? I think we should know.
Anyways ….what have I learnt worth blogging about?
Well, I learnt that the godbothering stranglehold over local healthcare is a myth – possibly with the exception of the Hospice (but then terminal illness at a place frequented by the privileged means possible legacies, while generally illness is more common amongst folk of slender means). After stating I wasn’t religious on both hospital entry forms I wasn’t pestered.
I saw one chaplain floating about in Nobles and he shot past, eyes averted. Quite funny really. I sit on a committee with all the Nobles chaplains who can be bothered to attend (e.g. evangelicals never attend meetings unless money is involved) so know them well and thought he could at least wave to a colleague in distress. Then again, I think rationally and my world is human-centred: he peddles superstition and to him humanity is just so many sheep to be fleeced to strict deadlines.
RCH's Anglican chaplain was more civilised. He knows me of old, and that I’m a raving atheist, but still found time while visiting a parishioner for a few words in passing about our respective families and ailments (poor bloke's iller than me). Just a decent cleric dispensing goodwill with no agenda and no kickbacks, which is as it should be.
I also got valuable lessons in patience and positivity from a friendly fossil in Nobles with problems which dwarf mine. As fast as he gets out of hospital, his wife goes in, and vice versa. With both, the heart, lungs, eyes and waterworks (just to name a few) are shot. This could make you very bitter or depressed - as could, for example, the jobsworth nurse who point blank refused him a bottle at 1 AM because he wasn’t on her ‘list’. Instead Malcolm cracked jokes non-stop while offering calm advice on practical problems of a painful, personal and physical nature to the bloke in the next bed. This sometimes had mixed results, as it’s hard to laugh with a full catheter.
Non-Manx readers won’t know the Manx Gaelic expression ‘traa dy liooar’ ( ‘time enough’ or ‘wait until tomorrow’), sort of a Manx version of ‘manyana’. It’s usually used as a way to indicate things aren’t urgent, or a stick with which anal tax-exiles, ‘come overs’ (new residents) and ‘when-I’s’ (ex-colonials who start every sentence with ‘When I was in….’) who tend to run the finance sector and better paid public sector monopolies beat laid back natives.
Malcolm had a better take on ’traa dy liooar’. For us hospital virgins it mattered that everything (treatment, healing…) happened within the day, so we could be home the next; if it wasn’t then we got depressed. He’d counsel us to stop worrying, think clearly, sort things yourself and if necessary without waiting for medical advice, but mostly to give it time and let things work themselves out.
So I’m doing that. The result might be less fullblooded assaults on people who (my extended examination of hospital ceilings lead me to think) are really too ridiculous locally to get angry about. It won’t mean (ever!) I stop rooting out their shortcomings and contradictory twaddle, though it might be a while before I’m up to speed on the background research.
I’m back, and laughing until it hurts.
Ouch! Where’s me Pethidine?