Hospitalization

Martin Porter
Written at the end of February 2026

This year, or perhaps at the end of last year, I found I could not walk without the sensation coming over me that I was about to faint, and I had to keep stopping and gasping for breath. Actually that was nothing new. I had had the same feeling at the end of 2021, and after various tests was put on a drug cocktail of amlodipine, indapomide and B12 injections four times a year, after which the sensation calmed down. But this time it got a lot worse. It would especially come on if I walked into town, but not regularly, and so I hoped it would pass. Eventually however people around me were commenting (“Are you all right, mate?”), until finally (on 4th Feb, it’s all in my diary) I did a short walk to the local shops and could barely get back home again. I was hanging onto a drainpipe, panting for breath, and a kind lady invited me to come inside her premises and have a chair. I went in, sat down, and asked where I was. I was in the funeral parlour on Unthank Road, among the undertakers who had dealt with my mother when she died. This was the first of series of events almost designed for the superstitious. There were two ladies there, who looked at me with a concerned interest, and asked if I wanted water, or to use a phone, but after sitting a good while felt well enough to get home again, and just managed it without a further attack. I had not told Ruth anything of what had been happening. I had not wanted to worry her as she has health problems of her own, and besides, I was hoping that the whole thing would pass and I’d get back to normal. This time I did tell her, and she immediately said we should see a doctor, so I made an appointment for the end of that week. This was a Wednesday; we saw the doctor on Friday.

Meanwhile Ruth caught influenza, and then I caught it from her, despite us both having recently been vaccinated. I think we were both unwell when we went to the surgery, Ruth recovering, me going down with it. Dr Elhaddad put me in for a variety of tests, with dates. I rapidly got worse. On Sunday, Ruth suggested I try a few steps outside to see if I could walk, and I found that after only three or four paces I needed to rest and recover. Ruth helped me back in, and I went to bed. I was so ill with coughing and other flu symptoms that I was getting no sleep at night. This time it all combined and suddenly got very much worse, until very quickly I felt I hadn’t long left, and called Ruth to explain what the immediate steps were in looking after my estate following my demise, where my online passwords were written down, addresses of people to inform, and so on. I noticed that dying itself was no big issue for me, it was the extreme discomfort of the process that was intolerable. Ruth went away and called a doctor, who advised her to ring 999, and when she returned to my bedside found me unconscious and thought momentarily that I had indeed died, but found I was breathing, and I did hear the frontdoor bell ring later.

After this I remember a confusion of bedroom lights and men leaning over me, but it was a long time before I could work out there were three of them: burly guys, two with beards. I’m not sure what they did, but they must have pumped a good few drugs inside me, as I was conscious enough to be walked downstairs to the ambulance, helped into it (I had to do one step up a short ladder), and driven to the hospital. Ruth had packed me a bag on their instructions, and put in my mobile phone, which they were later able to fish out and give me.

After this there was a long wait. It was dark and refreshingly cold with the ambulance door open, as I had run up a high temperature. The hospital is huge in area, and it was like looking out onto a big airport, with tarmac and distant lights and slow vehicle movement. By this time I was oddly lively, rang Ruth at home, who said afterwards I sounded as if I was “on something”, no doubt part of the paramedics’ medication. Ruth had informed my children, and Rachel had already decided to come up and see me the next day. I had a chat with one of the paramedics about his training course. Three years of lectures and practical experience, like working for any degree. Finally in the hospital I went through a “production line” of tests, slowed as you waited for the queue in front to clear. Questions by nurses with forms seemed to intersperse with the tests. They gave me extra oxygen with one of those gadgets that end with a tube up each nostril. I’d often seen these in films, and imagined they went deep into the nasal cavities, but in fact they just sit inside the base of the nose. The three burly guys went off as their shift came to an end, and were replaced by three young, pretty paramedicettes. I was finally taken for an X-ray, a long corridor march with me now in a hospital bed, and then, to my surprise, they took me back to an ambulance.

“Where are we going now?” I said.

“Nowhere,” they said, “we’re just waiting for a bed.”

“How long do we have to wait?”

They compared notes. Two hours, three hours, four hours, it was impossible to say. And this was what I heard thereafter. Whenever I asked how long something would take, no one knew. (My final impression is that the service has almost enough staff, but insufficient resources. It is like being in a huge traffic jam caused by congestion further up the road, in which the staff as well as the patients often have to wait. These girls had nothing to do except be in the ambulance with me until I had finally been disposed of.)

“You can have my kindle to read if you like,” one of the girls (Liz) said, “though I doubt if you’d like my romantic novel.”

After a bit I said I would like to read something, and she asked me what I liked. This was a puzzle. Indeed many of the questions and exchanges in the days following I found puzzling — perhaps I am just not used to talking outide the home any more. After a long pause I said “Shakespeare”, and was most impressed when she worked on her gadget for a short time, handed it to me, and I saw the Complete Works, starting with, “From fairest creatures we desire increase”. The girls chatted happily, and I heard not one word of their conversation as I tried to understand the navigation of the kindle material. After steering away from the sonnets, getting lost in one of the history plays, escaping from King Lear, I found Twelfth Night, and still managed to read one and a half acts before being delivered back to the hospital. I am used to Twelfth Night’s puzzles, Sir Toby’s answers to Maria, “Let her except, before excepted”, “I’ll confine myself no finer than I am” and so on, but for the first time I was mystified by Viola’s

Oh that I served that lady,
And might not not be delivered to the world
Till I had made mine own occasion mellow
What my estate is.

Oh, for some learned notes! I looked it up later, and all I was told is that “mellow” is an adjective, not a transitive verb. The intention is clear enough, that she will not reveal her true identity until the time is ripe, and only later did I unscramble the syntax into “Oh that I served that lady, and what my estate is might not be told to the world until I had made mine own occasion mellow (i.e. until I knew it was the right time).”

It is odd, looking back, that these were my main concerns while waiting in that ambulance. A few hours before I was preparing myself for death, and now I was entirely absorbed in four lines of Shakespeare.

The text was not of the best. For act 2 scene 1 an editor had added “A sea coast”, like act 1 scene 2. But obviously Sebastian and Antonio are not still stuck on the coast after the shipwreck. Viola has had time to become the Duke’s favourite and do proxy wooing for him. But this highlighted the oddity of Sebastian’s behaviour. Why should he have told Antonio that his name was Roderigo? Antonio is the one who has to disguise himself in Illyria. It’s not as if, like Viola, he has switched sex which demands a change of names.

I was delivered into A&E ward. It seemed a long wait to get there, but I learnt later that I was almost fast-tracked, being an ambulance arrival with paramedic accompaniment. The next tier down, people who’ve fallen off step-ladders or cut themselves on a kitchen knife, form a much slower queue outside. In the first night there the lights never went off, there was a huge noise and activity of patients and staff, and the sound of continuous bleeps from all the monitors and alarms that carried over the whole area. It was noisier at 3am than at 3pm the next day, and sleep was impossible. Temperature, pulse, blood pressure were constantly checked, plus doctors asking medical history. I had not slept in the two preceding nights but was not tired, I had not eaten all day but was not hungry. There was a nurse Ava, efficient but brusque, and a nurse Amarachi, black, beautiful, her hair in a bun.

The night passed, the shift changed. I was promised a visit by a cardiologist today, with some statement on my heart condition. In fact two turned up. The first one gave me the full picture: the heart has four chambers, one of the upper ones controls the one beneath with electric signals that may decay with age, and then the lower one responds with less force and more slowly than it should. This seems to be my case, but more tests are needed to be certain. The answer to this condition is a pacemaker, inserted in the body under local anaesthetic. This cannot be done if the patient is suffering from a viral infection, so I must wait until the influenza has quite cleared. (Actually it was the hospital that told me I had influenza. I did not know whether is was a very bad cold or influenza or covid. Bad luck, as Ruth and I had both had the flu jab earlier.) The second doctor was Herr Doktor Johannes Reinhold. He asked a few further questions.

I found I could not get a signal on my mobile phone during the daytime. This seemed odd, as I know you can get one in other parts of the hospital, and surely A&E patients, who might have been brought in unconscious from the city, would need to contact family more urgently than patients on any other ward. I think it was Philip who finally told me the reason. You used to be able to get a signal, but it was drowned out by the interference from other machines installed nearby. The signal came on again in the evening when these machines were switched off. In the morning Ruth, Rachel and Chris visited, bringing more things to make up for yesterday’s hasty packing, with a similar visit later, on both occasions much dismayed by my continued stay in A&E.

I had been promised a move to another ward, but the hours dragged on and it became clear no bed was available. When my visitors had gone I raised the matter with the nurse in charge, Lauren. I explained I had had no sleep for three nights, the noise was becoming intolerable for me, and I was seriously thinking of self-discharging. Nurses I found are either in caring mode, where sympathy for the patient is paramount, or strict mode, where they feel controlled by the rules and bureaucracy of the system they have to operate. Lauren was in strict mode, and told me that I could not have the pacemaker fitted until my viral infection was clear, that I could not be moved when there was no bed to move me to, that the viral infection could last a week, and that self-discharging instead of staying in A&E was up to me, but I could be putting my life at risk. I returned to my bed (walking round was forbidden as I might infect the other patients), wondering if I could endure another night there.

Lauren went off, and later three things happened almost at once. (1) I had another argument with a male nurse, saying I wanted to get up and have some exercise, (2) another patient lost it completely, and was screaming the f*** word all across the ward, causing great consternation while a group tried to calm him down, and (3) another nurse came up and told me I was being moved to AMUI ward.

I did not know that Rachel had been on the phone to the hospital insisting her Dad was moved, as the conditions where he was were intolerable. Later we checked the timings, and it looked as if the move was done just a few minutes after her call ended. Rachel gets things done.

During A&E I was continuously joined up to a heart monitor. Sensors around the body connect you via a cable to a screen where you see and hear the bleep-bleep-bleep of your heart. Actually, the cable comes apart at one point, with a male-female plug connector, and the two halves can be connected either way round. The large pins and sockets are colour coded so you know which way round to put them in. At first it was suggested I take the sensors and half the plug with me to join me to a similar monitor in the next ward, but at the last minute the whole contraption was taken off — there was no monitor for the bed to which I was taken. Porters do this bed moving. They have a style all their own: something of the stevedore or lorry driver. It was a scramble to collect all possessions onto the bed before the great move began. And then the move through the dark cool corridors of the vast hospital, the lights going on and off as they sense human movement.

AMUI ward was a paradise after A&E. No noise, no lights, a room to myself. I had hoped “Amui” was a an exotic foreign word that meant “peace” or “health”, but found the AMU means “Acute Medical Unit”. There is an AMUI, an AMUH and an AMUK. I suggested to one nurse that A&E be renamed AMOK, and she did get the joke.

The first night in AMUI I caught up with three nights of missed sleep, and also slept through some of the afternoon following. My room had its own bathroom, with shower and toilet. My risk of infecting others had purchased for me a degree of luxury. The first thing I did on waking was to have a shower, not noticing that there were no towels anywhere. A nurse sorted that out, and in the course of the day I was organised for new medication, my old being confiscated and locked up in a wall cupboard. There was a regimen of tests, injections, taking blood samples, and spartan meals. The food suited me, as I was not hungry, and much of it I declined, especially their tea. Ruth, Rachel and Chris came to see me again, in the morning and then later, with Philip and Nick also arranging visits. When they had finally gone I became tearful, realising how much love, undeserved it seemed to me, I inspired from my broken family.

I still had some residual flu symptoms, but otherwise felt well, apart from a weakness which stayed with me for several more days, gradually clearing. I had asked for a few books, but the one I read was Joyce’s Dubliners, which absorbed me for the rest of the week.

There had been two events recently to which I began to attach great significance. One was the disappearance of Paul, my bank manager, or more precisely a manager in a private bank who looks after some of my investments. I had got to know him well, and suddenly, like Syme in 1984, he is an unperson. It is odd how the acquisition of wealth can lead to a sense of affection for one’s bank manager. The other was learning that a start-up company in which I invested a large sum is to be sold, and in a few months time I should get my money back. I had not expected this outcome, and it seemed as if Fate was telling me that even if I did not benefit from the investment, my heirs soon would.

The last story in Dubliners is called “The Dead”.

I was moved to AMUI ward on Monday night, and was there until Saturday morning. I slipped into the unfamiliar routines of the place as I suppose a prisoner or army recruit learns the new environment. Every day the family visited. Philip travelled up to see me on Wednesday, Nick on Thursday. Rachel had to go back to Lewisham on Friday. I could use the phone, and played a bit of internet-chess, read, did a few sudokus from a puzzle book.

The hospital staff were from every race and country in the world. If Reform UK made Britain British again, in the way they understand that concept, the NHS would vanish. Accents could vary. For me the hardest to understand was the black Caribbean accent. “Ukangono” the nurse said to me after a later x-ray. When I asked her repeat it, she simply raised her voice, and I am indeed rather hard of hearing: “UKANGONO.” She was saying “You can go now.” I asked another nurse if she was German. No, she explained, she was Polish.

Ah, Polish,“ I said, ”I undestand that is a very difficult language.“

“Why?” she asked.

Now here was another puzzle. Did she mean, why is it difficult, or did she mean, why did I imagine it was difficult? The easiest course was to assume the latter, so I just told her what I had been told by others. Her next question puzzled me even more,

“Are you a doctor?” she asked.

She was clearly not being ironical. Of course, I might have said yes, because I have a Ph.D., but given the circumstances of being in a hospital, I chose to assure her that I was not a doctor. But why did she ask the question? The reason, I decided later, was that in her working life she had become familiar with the Norfolk/Norwich accent of the patients and the more educated accent of the doctor class, and placed mine with the second group accordingly.

Other confusions could arise. On Wednesday I was told to expect a visit from a cardiologist the next day, which I guessed might be to tell me when the operation was to happen, so as Thursday wore on with no sign of the visit I became disappointed. Finally I asked the nurse when I might expect the cardiologist.

“Oh, he has been to see you.” she said.

“No one has been to see me.” I replied.

“Yes, we have his report of the visit,” she said, “and the doctor always sends us the report after the patient has been seen.”

I had to balance her evidence with my own memory, and I came to the distressing conclusion that she must be right, that the visit had taken place, and that I had forgotten all about it. I must have been much more fuddled in the head than I had imagined. But later the doctor, “Ethan”, did turn up and confess he had filled in the form before seeing me.

Certain tests continued through the night: temperature, pulse, blood pressure, and I would be woken up and soon be back to sleep. But one night they took my blood pressure at 2am, and later returned because they did not trust its low reading. I was asked to drink lots of water. Then they returned and took my blood pressure again, and were presumably satisfied. By then it was 4am, and it was a night of little sleep.

Finally I was out of isolation and was moved to a bed on the general ACUI ward. I was visited by Dr Reinhold again, who said I was now working my way up the waiting list for the pacemaker operation. Since I had been on the list for a week, I would probably not have to wait long. On the general ward I witnessed some bad cases. That night a man was yelling continuously, whether from pain or not I do not know, but I got to sleep anyway.

And the next morning I was moved to Kilverston ward, again in my own little room, this time on a heart monitor again. Every ward has its own character. In ACUI they don’t mind if you decline the food on offer. In Kilverston they are more strict. So I really did have to drink the early morning cup of tea. (I confess that I surreptitously poured it down the sink.) For once I had a view. At a high level I looked out onto another section of the hospital with two gigantic cylindrical towers marked OXYGEN, and actually saw a lorry pull up to inject a fresh supply. As they disconnected the cable a huge cloud of the vapour like winter fog made the lorry disappear. It also snowed that day, and I sat watching the flakes swirling in the air. And suddenly came the announcement: the pacemaker would be fitted that day; I would be moved out of Kilverston that night.

I was wheeled to the operating theatre — a single large room — and asked to change, in one of the curtained cubicles outside, into the costume provided. The costume was a pair of socks, a backless smock, plastic underpants and a plastic cap of the type worn by women in the shower. I felt like a monstrous apparition at a fancy dress party. I was then given a sort of “terms and conditions” talk, on what could possibly go wrong and the probability that it would, and asked to sign a form, too long to read, that presumably said I wouldn’t sue anybody if I died. The man in the cubicle on my right had a very annoying phone, that played “Lucky lucky lucky me, I’m a lucky son of a gun” to announce a phone call. The nurse with me agreed that it was very annoying.

“And not a good omen before undergoing an operation.” I said. “It’s a good thing I’m not superstitious.”

“I am superstitious.” she said.

Perhaps I was too. In fact the operation was the easiest part of the whole week. I mounted the operating table via a short ladder, on my right a gigantic screen like an American TV set, an arrangement of blankets on my left to prevent me seeing what was happening, and initial pain that was only the anaesthetic needle, and then gentle conversation with the surgeon, Dr Williams, until it was all done. I learnt afterwards that this is his style to put the patient at ease, but is seems odd that he could talk while conducting an operation that requires access to a beating heart in the same way that my mother could talk to me or listen to a radio play while knitting. It turned out we had a lot in common. He had been at Girton, at the start of the time when it admitted men, I had been to St Johns, his daughter had done a museum studies course and worked in the museum system in Edinburgh, I told him of my own museum work. At the extreme, we even found common ground in the harmonica skills of Larry Adler.

Post-op and getting dressed, I heard exactly the same “terms and conditions” being given to the next patient in the adjacent cubicle. It was a production line.

(What does a pacemaker look like? Rachel knows, having seen them in quantity. When she was living in the morgue she told me that she and the girls found a bucketful of little metal objects which they worked out were pacemakers, cut from the corpses due for cremation.)

I had almost forgotten that after the op I was to be moved yet again, and this happened at 1am, when I woken with many apologies from a profound sleep and wheeled to Edgefield ward, told by the porter that a nurse would come and see me, but no one came. I was awake, the anaesthetic had worn off, and I was in pain, and needed at least some paracetamol. There was no help around. I eventually got up, and made my way to the voices I could hear outside the ward, where I found Tina, sitting in front of a screen with others, who befriended me, gave me water, but not being a nurse could give me nothing for the pain. Tina had her own views on this endless patient-shuffling between wards. A male nurse, Richard, eventually appeared, fixed my cannula which was coming to bits again, but could give me nothing for the pain, and ultimately I returned to my bed.

Later the ward woke up. There was a drug round and I begged paracetamol, but the nurse, not unfriendly but rather stiff, said I must wait my turn. Richard reappeared and made my bed more comfortable. For the first time since entry, I got an extra pillow. I asked him why Edgefield ward gave extra pillows while none of the others did, not imagining that such a silly question had any rational answer, but to my surprise he did tell me the exact reason, which was that Edgefield ward was used as a dumping ground for patients from other wards. They arrived in beds with one pillow, and on the patient’s discharge this pillow would be purloined and added to Edgefield’s cache of spares. (As I’ve said, all the wards have their own character.)

All I was waiting for now was my discharge, which required one further x-ray, a cardiologist visit, paperwork and medication. I had begged Ruth not to come early, as these stages, like all the others, had no time limit set on them, but she came early enough for us both to be bored with waiting, passing the time with walks round the corridors and staircases and tea in a place outside called The Pod. Eventually, all was complete except for medication, and here my boredom turned to anxiety as I was told that medication came from the “pharmacy”, and the pharmacy closed at 5pm. At about 4:55 we heard that it was ready to collect, and a nurse rushed the length of the hospital to collect it. It was in my hands at 5:03.

Unfortunately the story does not quite end there. On Thursday when Ruth came to see me (I finally got home on the Monday following) she fell in the hospital car park and hurt her foot. It was not too bad for the first few days, but gradually got worse and she became reliant on the car. Next Friday she phoned me at home to say the car had broken down with a mighty bang a few streets away. The axle to one of the front wheels had snapped, and the wheels were left non-parallel, so the car was in the middle of the road and could not be moved. I was too weak to leave the house, but Philip was here, and he and a helper we have called Chris sorted it all out, and eventually the car was mended and we think now that the car was weakened by the crazy roads the Google satnav took us on. I suggested to Ruth we sue Google.

By now I am better, while poor Ruth can barely get about and needs an x-ray herself.