Real life | 15 November 2018

Left at the Dementia Café, right at the Sleep Office, past the Spiritual Care Centre…

This was my journey through the ground floor of my local hospital until I came to the physiotherapy department where the Calf Stretching Education Group was being held.

Hospitals are very different places nowadays from the forbidding buildings of my childhood where doctors and nurses in starched uniforms used to attempt to cure people.

Now they host Costa Coffee shops and M&S mini food halls and art exhibitions along the walls, which you peruse in spite of yourself as you pass these marvellous new departments. You wonder what happens at the Dementia Café and the Sleep Office and the Spiritual Care Centre.

But mostly you get the feeling that healthcare has evolved to be about empowering people to feel good about dying. No more starched, old-fashioned curing. Hospitals provide education, enlightenment, spiritual guidance and a good cappuccino.

They offer you the opportunity to take control of your condition, to pick up your infirmity and, well, run with it. If you can run.

I ran all the way down the corridor past the Sleep Office and the Spiritual Care Centre because I was ten minutes late for the Calf Stretching Education Group.

It had taken a while to check my car in to the car park by typing my registration on to a screen. Then, once I got to the physio department, I had to check myself in on another screen.

And by then the group had started. A receptionist came off the phone and told me to follow her. After a while of us walking past rooms and her saying ‘Oo, I don’t know, I think it might be in here, but then again I don’t think it is’, I decided to just fling open the door to a small gymnasium.