The surreal purgatory of A&E

‘This is my father, and his pronoun is he,’ said the builder boyfriend, checking his dad into Accident and Emergency.

‘And how do we address you?’ said the personage at the reception desk. ‘You can address me as they,’ said the builder b, who was happy to go along with the way the hospital wanted to do things, if only to entertain himself during what was obviously going to be a long wait.

His father had fallen on top of a gas canister in their building yard and he was now in so much pain they suspected he had broken his ribs.

So off they went to a London casualty department that turned out to be something called ‘secondary’ in NHS jargon, which meant that if anything was seriously wrong it would require the involvement of a specialist from the ‘primary’ hospital down the road.

But, in any case, the process of becoming embroiled in our wonderful system could only be started by engaging with the ultra-woke check-in desk.

As his father groaned in agony, not minding whether he was referred to as he, she or that old git so long as someone did something to stop the pain, the BB decided to avail himself of the only rights any of us seem to have any more.

I would have requested the pronoun nya, because I identify as a Norwegian forest cat. But I’m just awkward like that. The BB was content to dabble with a bit of gender fluidity as his father was scanned and put in a bed in a corridor because his ribs were smashed and his lungs were slightly bleeding.

As the wait for a specialist began, the texts from the BB poured in, initially to describe the same encounter he always has in hospitals, which is to say he met a man with a leg missing who only went in for a broken ankle and caught MRSA.