Florence Nightingale in distress

My wife is not a naturally sympathetic person, and the easiest way to earn her disinterest is for anyone to start telling her about their hysterectomy operation, or prostate problem. Should someone start describing his rheumatoid arthritis, she’ll hastily summon the cook and start discussing a fictional dinner menu, or pretend she must make an urgent call. As more of our friends join the ranks of those suffering from piles, constipation, alopecia, skin rashes and allergies, hypertension, or organ and joint replacements, my wife makes sure to not visit the recently diagnosed, or cured, to avoid their tales of misery and woe. 

As a result, we tend not to know too many doctors — unless you include those who double as cosmetologists. So, she’ll share the number of her orthodontist because he makes your teeth whiter than white after he’s through performing a painful root canal. She’ll happily pass you on to her dermatologist, and make common cause with the ophthalmologist. Which is why, when I was diagnosed with an eye “problem”, she wasn’t too concerned about it. At first. She rang up her friends to tell them about my “procedure”, as she referred to an upcoming two-hour surgery. On the day, she dressed in her crease-free “hospital wardrobe”, and carried along a hamper for those she’d asked along to keep her company in her time of trial.

Unfortunately, the prognosis required multiple visits to the specialist, and more surgeries than she had bargained for. Having blamed it on my “thin cornea” and anything else she could recall from her arsenal of remembered conversations with the doctor, and tired of the trying regimen of medicines and drops, before long she dropped all pretence of playing Florence Nightingale. It began with “just a visit to a friend”, then “a quick lunch”, then a film she “really wanted to see”, before her full day replaced my own bedridden one. So, when I was finally cleared to return to work, she watched me head off with a sigh of relief.

The doctor continued to summon me to his chambers though, and I went alone, usually for painful but quick laser surgeries over several months. Till, finally, when he wanted to perform one last, corrective operation, by which time my wife was disinclined to accompany me even on my request. There’s nothing like resentment to take the edge off one’s pain, which is why I remember little of that surgery, and, on being wheeled out of the theatre, with the whole family assembled outside, I hardened my heart and refused to respond to their queries as they sat around joking and helping themselves to portions of blueberry pie. 

But in a rush of guilt, my wife thought that the best cure for my moping might be to surround myself with friends. It might have appeared a good idea for I was not permitted to read, use the laptop or watch TV. But she also set me up as the inadvertent target for their own tales of medical horror, recounted with great relish. Why do patients attract the most dreadful hospital memories? Lying in bed, I was the natural focus of their sagas of burst appendices and enlarged tonsils, of nasal congestion and terrifying bulimia. And while I can now empathise with my wife’s apathy to their medical conditions — and mine — she might have made it easier if she’d chosen to stick around instead of going off on her various rendezvous while leaving me “in their safe custody”.