‘A race through the subways and streets of Paris anuses.’ Startled, I reread the sentence. Surely that couldn’t be right. To pass the time I was flicking through a programme of December’s films at the local art-house cinema. The sentence came in a synopsis of a French crime thriller. Then I realised it was a misprint and should have read, ‘A race through the subways and streets of Paris ensues’. I was about to jab my friend with an elbow and point out the misprint to him, when his surname was called.
Five minutes before, he and I had taken the only two available seats in the hospital waiting area, among a crowd of maybe 50 or 60 other outpatients. As we sat, that Bible verse came to mind about tarrying at Jericho until your beards be grown. Hearing his name called so soon made us goggle at each other in amazement. ‘That’s me!’ he said. ‘It must be a mistake,’ I said contemptuously. Confirmation came in the form of a fearfully and wonderfully made nurse wearing festive antlers moving briskly through the crowd and bellowing his name again and again.
My friend has recently returned from the US, where he’s been receiving polite, efficient, intensive and effective treatment for the past three months. Now stabilised, and back at home in Britain, he’s continuing his treatment with visits to his nearest NHS hospital. He was perfectly optimistic about the prospect at first. In-patient care in Britain might in places have fallen back to pre-Crimean war standards, but the actual treatment end of the business still appears to be pretty good. Unfortunately, his first meeting with the consultant did not go well. This man seemed to hold it against my friend that he’d sought treatment elsewhere. He was chippy, dismissive and plain rude, apparently. My friend’s new-found but still fragile hopes for a future of any kind took a serious knock.
That was last week. This week he’d received a summons to appear again before this consultant, bringing with him all his notes and medicines. The actual purpose of the visit wasn’t specified. Last time, said my friend, the consultant had made him so angry, he’d found it hard to take in everything that was said. This is where I came in. If I came to the hospital with him this time, we thought, and sat in on the interview, perhaps taking notes, then maybe we could piece together all the crucial bits of information afterwards, no matter how rude the guy was. ‘If he’s uppity again,’ I said, ‘maybe we should just beat the shit out of him right there in his consulting room.’ My friend didn’t dignify this suggestion with an answer, but he didn’t look particularly horrified by it either.
Another reason for my going along was that it was a three-hour round trip by car from my friend’s house to the hospital, and he would be glad of the company, in any case, whether or not I was of any practical use to him at the interview. Besides, I hadn’t seen him since he’d left for the US and we had a lot of catching up to do. And over and above all this, he’s just a great bloke. He’s one of those life-affirming guys with a big laugh and an appetite for enjoyment who turns up out of the blue to offer unconditional help when you’re at rock-bottom and you think you’ve got no one to turn to. He makes his living salvaging shipwrecks, large and difficult jobs only, usually in out-of-the-way places. He put the mild symptoms experienced at the outset of this illness down to the variousness of the rums he was drinking on a job in the Bahamas.
When I turned up at his house I found him spooning soup. He looked frail, but the personality shone out no less vividly, in spite of the daily necessity for morphine. He insisted on driving, so we went in his diesel Golf. He powered the little car combatively through the muddy lanes and we talked and laughed non-stop all the way there. Even unwell, the man is a tonic for the troops.
And now here we were about to go in and see this consultant prick.
The nurse showed us into a small treatment room with two chairs and an examination couch. After about a minute, a young doctor bounced in to say that unfortunately the consultant couldn’t see him today — he sends his apologies, et cetera — and he’s been sent along instead, a very poor substitute — ha! ha! — to have a chat. He hadn’t read the notes, he was afraid. He was very much in the dark — as it were. Ha! ha! So. How were things? Everything going OK?
We were out of there in about three minutes. My friend didn’t trust himself to speak until we were well clear of the building. Then he spoke. Then we drove the hour and a half home again.
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