Low life
Come and get it
Jeffrey Bernard
Itried my artificial leg out for the first time last week at Charing Cross Hospital near Fulham, and was told that I had done remarkably well with it walking between parallel bars. It is a very tight fit, and after I had tried it out again back here in the ward on the next day I was very sore, although they say I have healed up well. What was extraordinary, and fairly typical, was that I managed to forget the leg and leave it behind at Charing Cross Hospital after the first trial. As the car ambulance I was in was leaving the premises a man ran up and shouted out through the window, `Excuse me, I don't want to seem rude but has anyone left a leg behind?' Amnesia will be the death of me. When I got back the doctor predicted that one day I would leave it in the Coach and Horses if some- body can strike a bet with me which will get me to take it off in the first place. Tak- ing it off and putting it on is, in fact, quite difficult and I hope that the finished article which I shall collect soon will be a slightly less painful fit.
Meanwhile, I have at last become resigned to the boredom and irritations of being stuck in here, and the thought of how to cope in the coming weeks worries me more than the endless breakfasts of Rice Crispies and being followed by a rather nice nurse who seems to spend all day trying to get me into the bath. The pleasure of soaking in hot baths vanished three years ago when I lost so much weight that I no longer had anything to sit on except for a pelvic bone. In the hospital they lower you into the bath sitting on a lavatory seat attached to a Heath Robin- son-type machine, and all too often they lower me with something of a bump: with a numb left foot and a right stump it is diffi- cult to tell the temperature of the water until one is immersed and either screaming or shivering. That nurse now thinks that I am averse to cleanliness. Strangely enough she is perfectly willing to pour me drinks, having taught her the right proportions of the mix.
Peter O'Toole was good enough to pay me another visit this week and he brought me a Walkman which was kind of him. It is odd in a way that he should know so much about the game of cricket, which somehow is not what you would expect a film star to have expertise about. He also tells a good story and not the usual show business jokes.
Last time I wanted to hear a joke that would make me laugh was when two phys- iotherapists took me home to my flat the other afternoon to see how I could cope by myself just with a wheelchair. The answer was not encouraging. In the first place the wheelchair, on a carpet as opposed to a pavement or a hard surface, moves like a ship sailing through glue. Only the artificial leg can bring life back to something near to normality again. Use of the lavatory and the simplest bit of cooking are now tower- ing problems in my mind and thoughts of the future. Who would have thought that both could be wonderful achievements?
And I notice that my visitors are thinning out now that the absent leg has lost its nov- elty. I suppose I shall have to send an S.O.S. to Mrs Bobbitt so that my little side ward can be filled again with flowers, vodka and cigarettes. Meanwhile the old ladies who have had hip replacements are improving by leaps and bounds. Joy has her clips or stitches removed today and she is going home tomorrow which leaves just two of us chain-smokers sitting on this awful landing all day. My new partner on the landing is the only patient here who I can feel genuinely sorry for. She has the most awful problems with her pancreas and I wonder why God ever invented that hideous gland that makes nothing but insulin if it is working and agony if it isn't. Mr Russell here is the expert at performing a pancreatectomy: he's welcome to mine.
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