Went to see my brother yesterday. And realised that I’m now fully conversant with the protocols for and at the Royal Free Hospital. Like; don’t even try to park within 500 yards of the place, it’s impossible. Like, if you take the lift to the 4th floor you end up in ICU reception and need to be buzzed through security doors to the wards, which in turn have their own security doors. But the reception desk is not always… ‘manned’? Can I use that word??? In Scotland I’d be arrested for even thinking of it. Anyway, you need a ‘person’ behind the desk, of unspecified religion, race, gender, sexual preference, football team supported, political affiliation or preferred chocolate bar, to ‘buzz’ you in, and at weekends and evenings such a person is absent. So you have to wait. Either for the next day’s shift to start or for some staff member to come from the wards into reception, when you barge them out the way and make a break through the open doors. Whereas, if you take the stairs, they bring you out on the ward corridor, the ‘other side’ of the reception doors!!!

The problem being that the ICU is on the 4th floor. and the stairs are very steep. So that’s how I can justify all the cake and chocolate I’m going to eat to replace all those calories burned on the way up. But here’s the weird bit; you go to floor 1, then 2 , then 3 and then, just as your thighs are burning and your breath coming short… you arrive at floor… nothing. Its not marked. Just a door with ‘no entry’ on it. Not ‘4th floor but you can’t come in’, not ‘danger: nuclear waste facility, you will grow extra limbs if you enter!!!!’, nothing. Yet it is a floor, so why don’t they number it? Possibly its just there to persecute the stair climbers by giving them a false sense of arrival. Bastards. Then another flight to the (nominal) 4th floor, even though we know its really the 5th.

Then we see the Brother. Yesterday, sitting in a chair. Holy fuck. That’s a good thing indeed. Still wired up like the NASA space centre but sitting. But this is the official progress report.

1. Stay alive. Check
2. Keep alive. Check
3. Regain consciousness. Check
4. Speak again. Check.
5. The ultimate sign of real recovery, at least for the time being, the true indicator that ‘he is back’. Complaining. Moaning. Impatience. Check, check, and check again.

And glorious that he is. All three. He hates sitting in the chair, and now he can let us know. And rather than my usual response which might be: stop fucking whingeing you ungrateful fucker, instead I just appreciate how massive an improvement it is that he can feel uncomfortable and express it and smile lovingly.

Onwards and upwards

A xxxx