Personal

 

Hospital in May

When you enter they only want to know your name and how to contact you again. There’s no time for small talk, some stories to break the ice, if you went to university. Their one interest is your complete well-being. They are dressed for it. They address you likewise with a direct speech touched by urgency. Their machines are designed with the same purpose, to find precisely what is your problem anyway. Animate and flickering inanimate exist because your well-being “is important to us.” Together they are there for your most personal need, now. All other needs occur in remote other nows. Apparently corridors are impersonal, swing doors and beds on wheels rolling through the swing doors. Yet every little electro-sticker is a personal badge. Clean needles read red blood for a personal result. Ear thermometer tells them the goldilocks plan, your personal heat. Unpronounceable tablets fast-track a personal normal. Paper thimbles of unpronounceables tip your own personal comeback. Zigzag monitors pulse ups and downs of very personal minutes. Down the corridor nurses converse about the progress of the latest patients, who refuses their medication, who cannot remember the date, or their own name, who is a priori a pain in the posterior, who’s a sweetheart. It gets very personal down there. They are concentrated on accurate measurements, timetables of check-ups, every step in the day that keeps the health fluctuations of dozens of patients under control, under benign surveillance, and at the very least moving along steadily. They are made for it, each with their own personal touch, and at present their main topic of converse is you. You are the name you gave at Emergency, but then you are the sum of all the personal details of care that are your unique situation. A common enough situation, granted, but for them and you the matter of the moment. Doctors arrive, clipboards, to speak frankly but thoughtfully about your famous condition in terms that are for now yours alone. The nature of cotton blankets keeps you warm, but not too warm. A bed curtain travels on hanging rails for your complete privacy. Wristbands leave no margin of error for your declared allergies. Surface pads of stethoscopes step onto undulant sites of turbulence below. Deltas of wires update recurrence. Down in the café visitors complain how impersonal these places are, sipping on their personalised coffees, taking small bites out of their hand-crafted pastries. Whereas there is no let-up on the other side of the swinging doors. Here staying personal is the essential transaction. Time moves from a matter of urgency to hours of window staring, the same pace you move towards the next adventure.