Low life
Paying the price for a drink
Jeffrey Bernard
was beginning to feel fairly smug at the beginning of my seventh week without a drink but apparently I am still on God's shit-list. He or she is pretty unforgiving and I was quite alarmed when I suddenly vom- ited what was the colour of burnt Sienna. tried to resist going back to the Middlesex Hospital for the fourth time this year but when my Home Care arrived in the evening to make me some supper she insisted on phoning 999 for an ambulance• It turned out that I was having a haemor- rhage in my oesophagus. I thought I bad paid my bill for the party that I've been having for 40 years, but it was as though a head waiter had suddenly presented rile with an astronomical bill. No, a cosmic bill• I now have to take a couple of capsules a day for ever — they would cost a pound each if I wasn't exempt from paying pre- scription charges — and the last drink was supposed to be the last drink only it would be daft to look beyond tomorrow.
Apart from the trivia of life and death, there are minor irritations which are, in fact, not so trivial. I have not only just been invited to stay in Dublin for two weeks, but I am told that I can get a cot- tage there by the sea, but Ireland and par- ticularly Dublin go with boozing like fish and chips.
Constant nausea apart, this last stay in the Middlesex wasn't quite as bad as usual. I saw the great amputator, Mr Cobb, again and he was as charming as ever. He now has the slightly disconcert- ing habit of patting me as though I were a child when he says goodbye, but he pats me on my stump and I think he's still rather pleased with the neat job he made of it. His registrar, the equally delightful Mr Sweetman, had a little chat with me and then told me he was off upstairs to operate on a man who had jumped out of a window.
The thought is horrific and I wonder how many bolts, screws and titanium it Will take to put him together again. The titanium plate that Mr Cobb put in my hip nearly three years ago never aches any more whereas at one time it was a barom- eter of sorts.
More appalling than fractures and non- stop vomiting was the case of an ancient woman I met on 'smokers' landing' who couldn't walk, lived on a pension and was about to be discharged although she had recently lost her flat and had nowhere at all to go. The plight of that nice old woman is more than sickening and sad and this government should hang its heads in shame or better still simply be hanged. It is chilling to see the cheery staff telling a patient that he or she may now go home. What home? At least my cup runneth over even if my glass is empty. My only regret is that I wasn't in the ward next door which was run by a sister who was startlingly like a villainess from a James Bond story, a bit like the man with steel teeth. She's Chinese, sinister, unpleasant and probably entirely made of steel her- self. I am very good at dealing with such nurses who behave like prison officers since I have no respect or any fear whatso- ever for any of them. The tactics are like Mike Tyson's. You take the fight to them and establish that you are not there to be pushed around.
I was pleased to hear that the bitch of a staff nurse who I used the `f word to is still reeling under the blow and with luck Perhaps she might no longer be a bully. What a pity it is that people make the mis- take of thinking that most or all male bul- lies are cowards. That can be a dangerous assumption.
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