Waiting and reading, reading and waiting…
We’re both waiting: me for him and him for his results. I’m sitting on a comfortable armchair in the relative’s room, he’s sitting on a hard upright in a nearby corridor. I have my laptop and a book to read, he can’t concentrate so he studies the cracks in the lino. My stomach is slightly full after a hearty breakfast; his rumbles with the emptiness of not knowing. The time ticks by.
He’s back. No news though. Someone got the time wrong. "Come back later, 3.30 this afternoon. She’ll see you then." That didn’t go down too well. We’d come early, missed the morning rush, got here in plenty of time – or so we thought. "They’ll have to see me now cause I’m not coming back. Be here around ten, that’s what I was told."
Rules are rules but when he said, "Stuff that, I’m not hanging around till then" they found someone, someone who’d see him sooner, see him this morning, at eleven to be precise.
We went for coffee. Sat in the brightly lit cafeteria where chairs screeched and a queue snaked around the out-patients with doctors, nurses, visitors, all supping and chatting in a cheery atmosphere that belied the reason we were all there: cancer, in all its nasty forms.
Outside we walked among the daffodils and the smokers, the hopeful and the damned; yellow flowers billowing in the breeze, yellow stained lungs wheezing breathlessly.
Back inside, we wait for news that may change everything. My pc’s running out of battery while he sits reading the cracks like tea leaves at the bottom of a cup. I take out my book and start reading again.
I finished that book, eventually. It was one that needed total concentration and for someone who reads four or five books at a time I quickly realised that it needed my full attention. I’d always wanted to read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; he was one of those authors on the list of ‘must reads’ and quite by chance I’d chosen to start with Cancer Ward. No, I didn’t let him see the title as we sat in that waiting room and he didn’t ask.
I got totally confused with names starting off with Pavel, who was occasionally called Pasenka, or even Pasik. Anyway, Pavel Nikoloyevich Rusavov and his wife Kapitolina or even Kapa were joined by daughters, Aviethe and Maike and son, Yuri in this classic novel which everyone who complains about our health system should read. Mary Harney probably has a copy in her bedside locker. I couldn’t put it better than the blurb on the back: "One of the great allegorical masterieces of world literature..is both a deeply compassionate study of people facing terminal illness and a brilliant dissection of the ‘cancerous’ Soviet police state."
PS
Results eventually came back and my friend is on the mend. He hasn’t spoken to me since that day and I often wonder if it’s because I saw him at his lowest point when he was most vunerable. I wish him well.
He’s back. No news though. Someone got the time wrong. "Come back later, 3.30 this afternoon. She’ll see you then." That didn’t go down too well. We’d come early, missed the morning rush, got here in plenty of time – or so we thought. "They’ll have to see me now cause I’m not coming back. Be here around ten, that’s what I was told."
Rules are rules but when he said, "Stuff that, I’m not hanging around till then" they found someone, someone who’d see him sooner, see him this morning, at eleven to be precise.
We went for coffee. Sat in the brightly lit cafeteria where chairs screeched and a queue snaked around the out-patients with doctors, nurses, visitors, all supping and chatting in a cheery atmosphere that belied the reason we were all there: cancer, in all its nasty forms.
Outside we walked among the daffodils and the smokers, the hopeful and the damned; yellow flowers billowing in the breeze, yellow stained lungs wheezing breathlessly.
Back inside, we wait for news that may change everything. My pc’s running out of battery while he sits reading the cracks like tea leaves at the bottom of a cup. I take out my book and start reading again.
I finished that book, eventually. It was one that needed total concentration and for someone who reads four or five books at a time I quickly realised that it needed my full attention. I’d always wanted to read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; he was one of those authors on the list of ‘must reads’ and quite by chance I’d chosen to start with Cancer Ward. No, I didn’t let him see the title as we sat in that waiting room and he didn’t ask.
PS
Results eventually came back and my friend is on the mend. He hasn’t spoken to me since that day and I often wonder if it’s because I saw him at his lowest point when he was most vunerable. I wish him well.
Labels: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward, Mary Harney
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