THE HOSPITAL AT NIGHT
By DAVID WINSER ,
IT is always very dark in hospital at night, unless casualties are being brought in. The passages are lit only by oil- lanterns, which might be as old as the hospital. The wards are so dark that very ill patients, or old men, imagine extra- ordinary and often quite pleasant happenings. The ill patients tell you about them apologetically, when they are well again. The old men get out of bed and kill monsters, or are found wandering down the passage because they have forgotten they are not at home. When the nurses have to pursue them, they do it very successfully. Nurses have cat's eyes, and can see in the dark. They sweep past with a rustle of clean starched uniforms before you know they are there. They walk with the same controlled urgency by night as by day, whether to a routine job or to an emergency. They only run if someone is being sick.
It is dark downstairs also, except at the casualty entrance, where the porter talks to a couple of policemen and the telephone-operator sits at his desk and draws pictures of bizarre castles. One of the policemen collects autographs of famous composers, and he brought a suitcase full to show us when we were on night duty. But for the war, he had meant to buy a small scrap of Beethoven on an envelope. From the casualty entrance a long lighted passage runs past the Men's and Women's Casualty, past two operating-theatres which they use during the raids, and into a sudden wall of darkness. This is the beginning of the Reception-Room, where the stretcher-bearers sleep, in case air-raid casualties are brought in. L.C.C. ambulance men bring in their own casualties, but the A.R.P. are m a hurry to get back to the incident. They have to be met by stretcher-bearers and they are often excited, distrusting the way the hospital takes in the casualties they have nursed so carefully, or seen dug out so laboriously from under such heavy piles of disrupted houses. The hospital takes them in impersonally, and the stretcher- bearers feel very personally about them. Sometimes they suddenly see that the casualty they were concerned about is dead, and they are sad and awed, and wonder if they could have done anything.
But we do not enjoy air-raid casualties, because there are too many of them, and there is very little to do but give them morphia and sometimes stored blood and set their limbs and clean their wounds. Even that would be enjoyable if there were not so many of them at once. It becomes an emergency, and medicine is better done slowly and carefully. The enjoy- able casualties are the single ones, for whom there is some- thing to do. It is sad that they are casualties, but that is none of our doing. We have the better job of watching doctors settle cases which, as students, we did not understand, and seeing a person in pain, with muddied clothes and blood on his hands or with the anxiety of being inexplicably ill, suddenly transformed into a white-bandaged patient who is sure to get well again. It is a beautiful, almost perfect, change. One moment they are less than human, degraded by dirt, weakened by wounds or illness ; and in an hour they are clean and fresh, doped a little, feeling almost well again.
All the people who come in at night are individual and curious. By day they are just ordinary people ; they are never ordinary by night. Sometimes they are foreign, and make rules that they will only answer questions put to them in French, even though they understand English quite well if they have to. There was an Italian once, not too badly hurt, and he made this rule and then lay there, swearing quietly and continuously in Italian.
" 0 Dio mio!" he swore, " 0 Dio mio! 0 dolore!"
If he had been badly hurt he would have made less fuss. It is always the people who are badly hurt who say they are quite all right. Sometimes they say it is silly for them to be in hospital, really they are all right and would rather go home. And once, with the same contentment, one of these breathed like a frog and dropped off to death. No one could stop him.
We almost love these night-casualties when they decide not to die. We have done nothing for them, even the doctors have only done what you can do with the incredibly subtle cell-mechanism that is alive in them. But we have washed them, and the doctors have given them morphia and splinted their legs. When they decide to live we feel we have created something. The time goes quickly as we put in unimportant stitches.
When girls have cut their faces, we daren't put the stitches in. A houseman has to do it, in case we make a mistake. There was a girl once, and whenever she realised that her face had been cut—it was a little cut, only an inch or so and not deep—she shivered. She tried not to shiver, but her body shivered for her, because she was so frightened about her face. A nurse got out the stitch-tray, stitch-forceps, ether, scissors, horse-hair, needles, sterilised water ; and a houseman put the stitches in and they were all right.
After twelve we go to sleep, and only the porter and one houseman are awake, besides a little scattering of nurses. It is very quiet downstairs, except when a casualty suddenly arrives and the system swings into action again after a momentary pause for sleepiness. It is quiet upstairs, too, except where the old men are sleeping. They talk in their sleep, and see monsters. The nurses walk about in the dark- ness and soothe them.
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