The hospital room was crowded. Bed after bed pressed together with people lying like flies on their backs. At night you could hear them crying. Hear them talking and wandering through the corridors. Waiting.
They slept the majority of the day so at night they did little more than talk and lie awake. Sometimes one of them would drop off and not wake up again.
That was always exciting for them.
One patient, a short man with leukemia, who lay on the bed closest to the right window, had been in the hospital for months. The section of the hospital this group of humans now lived in was known as the hospice. Which in terms they do not want to utter aloud is the place people go to die. He had not expected to be there for longer than a week. But here he was four months after he had gone in and still he remained the same.
Doctors and nurses came and did checks on him. Took blood, took hair samples and urine samples and every day the news was the same.
“We are afraid you don’t have much longer sir.”
He gave them this look when they said that. It was half fright half rage. His anger that they were so incompetent that they could not even predict his death.
His fright that maybe this time they were right. Of course, what could he do if he died, no more would he be able to sit at his greasy window and watch healthy people stroll past. No more would he awake at five in the morning with a cry of impatience.
He hated the doctors and nurses as much as he was afraid they were right.
Another patient named Ross had bone cancer and had already had both legs and one arm amputated. He lay there while they discussed getting rid of the last arm, dying in his bed, with not even the option to walk around. He read a lot Ross did. Books of fiction by famous authors of the time. Crime books based on fact, romance novels of able-bodied men strutting their way across bedrooms.
I guess he wanted to live through those books. Or maybe they were just preferable to lying there with nothing to do but contemplate what awaited him.
I liked Ross. He never moaned. He wasn't like the man with leukemia, he simply read his books and laughed aloud at passages of them, he never moaned. We played chess sometimes, me leaning over the side of my bed and him holding his book in his hand and dictating to me where to move his pieces. I never won. He used to gaze up to look at the board with an almost bored expression and say.
“I believe that is checkmate” and then carry on with his book.
I never minded losing to him, I think him winning meant more than he let on.
Next, to me, there used to be a woman. She was more of an average patient in every aspect except for the fact that she never left her bed. Of course, there were many patients in that long room who were unable to leave their beds, but she was not one of them.
Not once had anyone heard anything about what was wrong with her but she lay there all day smiling at the ceiling with a dreamy expression on her face. We used to think she was autistic because no matter how often you called her and shouted by her face she never reacted. I have been here for a long time but she was there when I arrived here, smiling at the ceiling with the blanket pulled up to her chin. At night, when even the lights of surgery had gone out and blackness filled the room like the cancer in so many of our bodies sometimes we heard a voice come from her bed. An almost childlike voice, so innocent it hurt my heart.
“Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do I’m half-crazy all for my love of you,
It won't be a stylish marriage. I can’t afford a carriage, but you’ll look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle made for two.”
My granddad used to sing that song for me when I was very young and I always wanted to thank her for that but after a while, a nurse came in and wheeled her out of the ward and one night they never brought her back.
The days passed like this, with these strange characters.
The woman who had no nose so was forever whistling when she breathed. The young man with broken teeth and a scar running from the corner of his mouth to his right eye, who never spoke but who the day before he died had started screaming that he didn’t want to go. The child bald from chemotherapy that never had visitors and gazed out the window every day waiting for something that never came. Some people only were in the ward for a few hours. Were brought in screaming and begging for the doctors to save them but who after a sedative lay there weakly silent until the heart monitor ran flat.
You probably think that we are dismayed from the constant parade of death that is waved in front of us, but all in all seeing people like that actually takes from your mind the fact that at any moment that could be you. I used to join a young man for walks around the grounds at night sometimes when he wanted company. I didn't talk much and neither did he but the company of each other was nice. Sometimes we had two women from the ward join us and it would be almost like a date. Two men and two women talking, sometimes laughing, sometimes walking in a comfortable silence. Feeling ordinary for once. I liked those nights but it wore us out, we would not get up for days after one of these nights. Just lie there panting and hoping against hope.
One night not so different from the rest, a fire broke out across the street. You could see it from the window close to the man with leukemia. It cast an orange glow through the window and onto our faces. It was Ross who called out about the spectacle and one by one, the ones who were able, got up to gaze at the roaring flames, flying high in the sky like a flag, waving and dipping in delight. Sirens echoed around the ward and we knew there would be a rush of new patients. New beds would be pushed into rooms already full.
We stood together around that window united with our common boredom and enjoying the flames dancing in the night. At one point someone looked down and remarked that the man with leukemia was dead. We looked down at him. He looked so frightened and we moved our gazes from him back to the fire and then back again. Not wanting to miss anything. He had waited too long for us to feel sympathy. We knew that no matter how frightened he may have been of death; he must have felt some relief as he slipped off.
I wondered what the night would be like when I went. If people would be gathered over my body with some spectacle visible in the distance to take half of their attention, or whether anyone would even notice. Whether I would lie there for hours with my heart no longer beating in my chest as it was right now. Whether I would even be able to remember my life in death. I didn't care what comes after this, but it makes me sad sometimes when I think of the life that could be lost. All these memories, all these people who themselves might go before or after me, all these feelings. Who will remember them? Who will know about us? About the man with leukemia who was equally frightened and impatient for his death. About the near cripple who did nothing but read and win at chess. About that girl, lost in her mind, singing songs for the nearly departed. About my friend who walked with me and who one night tried to kiss me from loneliness or maybe just from fear. And about me, the nameless patients who just like the rest are waiting here for something. Something that we have spent our lives waiting for.
Author bio:
William Hayward is currently a first year student at Newman university, studying English and Creative writing. He has been writing for about four years and would like to think he has improved.
Photo by Daan Stevens on Unsplash