Viewing life over a plaster-cast leg

Press, 30 December 1988, Page 15

Viewing life over a plaster-cast leg

Life got short on laughs for NANCY CAWLEY earlier this year as she watched, the world through a rear window.

Being a cinema devotee, my son spots, it at once. “Rear Window!” he says, looking with narrowed eyes at the plastercast on my leg and the wall of windows across the hospital yard. Not that he thinks I look like Jimmy Stewart, or Grace Kelly for that matter, but it gives us both a laugh.

Sometimes you get a bit short on laughs in hospital. Especially when you start thinking that one minute you were ski-ing down a mountain and the next you were here, lying tidily in bed with a leg vou wish did not belong to you. When my son has gone, I lie back looking with renewed interest at the old brick facade opposite. If you have seen Hitchcock’s 1954 film, you will remember that an immobilised Jimmy Stewart sees a murder happen in a window across the yard from his apartment. Then the killer comes gunning for him. 00, er. Does that mean that I might ... ? No, I seem pretty safe. Nothing violent happening over there. Just nurses passing to and fro in front of the big sash windows, and now and again a wan patient looking wistfully out. Starlings still fussing around their nest above a drain-pipe, and the sinister white-painted groundfloor windows (operating theatres?) still holding their secret. A middle-aged man appears in an upper window, pushes up the sash (and

leans out. “Oh no. Don’t do it,” I scream silently. But he is just throwing bread to the sparrows.

exit, and after rushing around like a rat in a maze, they give up and retrace their steps. Soon the shabby ornate building will be demolished, as part of Christchurch Hospital’s expansive new look. A pity, it has great aesthetic appeal, especially when slanting sun brings the brick pie-crust trim and plaster curlicues into relief.

I am told that there was a large camellia bush growing in the centre of the yard, until hospital decision-makers removed it to make way for a carpark. Three months later, the on-going replacement of hospital buildings called for the yard to be closed off. Result: no carpark, no camellia bush. Now and again, someone makes my day by bursting out of one of the many doors opening on to the rubbley yard, obviously intent on exiting to the outer world. This is no

In this ward, nurses go about their duties in a chatty relaxed fashion. Short-sleeved uniforms, hair loose and often longish, no more caps or veils. Everyone is on first-name ternjs, and the stern

authoritarian ward sister of yesteryear has been replaced by a smiling approachable staff nurse. The nurse who helps you on to a bed-pan is just as likely to be male as female, and the ward is unisex too.

Our glassed-in veranda, with its single row of beds facing on to the yard, opens off the main ward and is comparatively peaceful. Patients lie quietly, concentrating on getting better. A few beds along, a student with motor-bike injuries watches the Olympics on his portable telly. Every 20 minutes,the elderly woman in the bed beside me sighs and says, oh dear. I cannot blame her. Visitors come and go, leaving flowers and more flowers. So the real world still exists.

At night, there is a different range of sights and sounds. The night nurses pad around with torches, and the old man in the main ward starts singing hymns again. He has a sweet true voice and sometimes I feel I would like to join him. I shove The Leg around into its least uncomfortable position, and before I go to sleep I count the days until I go home. Ordinary living is going to be so beautiful, f will never complain again.