Bedside

 

Hospital in May

Bedside Glossary. Blanket: a two-dimensional intricate layer designed to accommodate the patient’s every three-dimensional stretch, curl, turnover, turnback, layout, quasi-shiver, cuddle, hang-loose, breathing in, breathing out, deep dream warmly and effectively for forgotten durations. Card: a colourful gate that opens towards the patient like a handwave or a blessing with get well soon, thoughtful, lined along the sill to join a street of gates, the patient’s caring neighbourhood watch. Flower: a paradox of petal and stem saying get well soon, its own life drastically shortened in so doing; saying, thinking of you; its other thoughts similar to the patient, here comes the sun; typically arrives in groups of paradoxes, with handwave gate, beribboned. Jug: a glass round-tower reflecting red light switches, orange apparatus indicators, nightlight white stripes, blinking fixtures, its ice blocks melting to cool midnight dry throat and here comes daybreak Panadol revival. Log: a scrupulous compendium of blood pressures and temperatures and medications and the patient’s midday confessions about where it hurts; huddled over by doctors, their bedtime reading, coming along swimmingly. Phone: an oblong black universe held in the hand, once pressed offers the known world in bright-lit slides that flip the news, snap happenstance apps, private message get well soon, go ogle whatever. Remote: a spaceship-shaped hand device devised to delve every corner of the patient’s personal universe, the room wherein hours become years and years eons, switching on a nightlight, beaming up the television mooning in the ceiling, alerting nurse during an imagined relapse. Spectacles: a device that, propped on the nose, makes larger than life the steadying words of the occupational therapist, in essence never spend more than ten minutes on any task; otherwise a coagulation of scripts. Stitch: an invisible mending further repaired by flesh, holds ribs secure; a bind that breathing makes home. Tablet: typically a white pebble that, once consumed, stops things, or starts things, increases things, decreases things, thickens things, or thins them, speeds up things, slows them down, for a while, before another white pebble must be consumed, and so on, and so forth, ever your most humble servant. Tray: a magic platform gliding into place from the invisible kitchen, loaded with breakfasts, lunches, dinners, thereafter perforce a pile of empty cartons, crumpled napkins, cutlery awry, thence away to the invisible washing-up. Window: a transparent device, like spectacles, to remind the patient of the past and future world beyond the precious confines of operations and recoveries; to offer promise of life beyond get well soon and just taking your temperature.