Tender Mercies
The Sun Herald
Saturday October 3, 1992
A WARNING may be in order. Not only was I in hospital last month but I also propose to share the experience with you.
Before you marvel over the fact that the editor will allow such self-indulgence, I will tell you what I told him.
It is the only column I can write lying down. And I was certainly lying down after the nice people at St Vincent's Private Hospital put the bill in my hand. But we will get to that quickly enough, as they did.
The only other time I had a real stay in a hospital was decades ago, when I was 13 and had to have my appendix out. I was in a hospital called the Mater, which no longer exists, and almost all I can recall is my terror at the sight of the nuns.
I kept thinking they'd figure out I wasn't a Christian, let alone a Roman Catholic, and when I woke up from the anaesthetic with a scar from here to eternity, I was pretty sure they had.
St Vincent's was different, of course. Once you got away from the artworks downstairs, that was about it for the visible signs of religion, apart from the little metal figure over the door of each ward, an icon so remote from the traditional tormented Christ that it was more reminiscent of a long-hair doing yoga.
I didn't notice the icon right away, however. I was too busy adjusting to the role of patient, an adjustment that was like falling down the White Rabbit's burrow.
I felt myself getting smaller and smaller. I had slipped into a realm where others made all the decisions.
But I wasn't used to it yet and I voiced such amazement at the idea that I had to hand over the medicine I had with me, that the ward sister - a thoughtful woman in her 30s - said the roles played by doctor, nurse and patient had been compared with the roles of father, mother and child.
The nurses hovered around, of course, and the doctors put in ritual appearances.
Outside of a couple of fields like paediatrics and psychiatry, nine out of 10 of the specialists are men. In a public hospital, I would have seen them appearing as if descending from the clouds, with their own personal entourage of registrars, residents, interns and students.
It was conceivable that there was a fraction more equality at St Vincent's, where the honoraries deal direct with the nursing staff, instead of having their sense of self-importance inflated still further by the obvious distance between themselves and other forms of human life: even so, like minor characters in a morality play, they seemed to be all-seeing, all-knowing, and more or less invisible.
They dropped into the ward for two or three minutes of a morning or an evening, a polite convention made politer still if the doctor took a curtain-call before the operation.
That's what my surgeon did. Then everybody disappeared and for the next 12 minutes I had the chilly anaesthetic room all to myself. If I had been my usual self, I may have carried on a bit about being left there like a lost parcel, on a trolley parked outside the operating theatre.
At the time, however, I was too distracted to think of it. I was wearing a hospital gown and, underneath it, a garment a little like a nappy, intended to preserve the concept of modesty during an operation.
THE clothes were bad enough. Worse still was the shower-cap that came with this ensemble. I took it off and considered hiding it before I realised they would put another on my head the instant I was unconscious. So I put the thing on again at what I hoped was a rakish angle. I wanted to look my best.
Shot full of whatever it is they give you before an operation, I had managed to forget that the surgeon was interested only in my mid-section. In fact, he was about to carve it up.
When I came to, with something like a zipper straight down my midriff and a sense I can only describe as post-operative tristesse, I told myself it was time to snap out of it.
The nurses helped. One of them happened to remark how many of the male doctors condescended to their female patients, speaking to the women in hospital quite differently from the way they spoke to the men.
I could well imagine it. A week earlier I had bumped into a 40-year-old specialist who seemed never to have met a woman journalist before. His idea of light conversation was to ask if I wrote about cooking.
My doctor may have been a shade more enlightened. That is to say, he did not, inevitably, belong in a museum.
I revised my opinion of him anyway. It was because of another stray remark by a nursing sister. She said she thought he looked like John Hewson. I might have made the same loud noises of distaste if she had invoked Keating. No-one in her right mind wants a politician around when feeling vulnerable and now I was stuck with a doctor I thought of as Dr Hewson.
When he gave a graphic description of the state of my gall-bladder, I stared at him so sceptically he might have been talking about a new tax.
Yes, you heard right. Dr H had removed my gall-bladder. I was wondering if I could skirt the question, frankly. That particular operation does not conjure up a glamorous invalid-like consumptive Violetta in La Traviata.
Instead of a hectic flush and a lot of dramatics, you end up with a specimen jar of pebbles that resemble black-eyed peas in soupy water.
I left it there on the bedside table. I didn't need evidence of the operation. I had the bills after all. St Vincent's probably charges about the same as any other private hospital.
Six days there was about to set me back $2,400, not counting extras like the operating theatre ($858) or the imported anti-embolism socks ($11), or the cost of the actual operation.
I tried to sell the nice folks at the hospital the socks back at a discount, but it didn't work. Instead, they gave me time to pay for them.
The trouble is I don't have private health insurance. I did not anticipate landing in a private hospital, of course. I guess I should have argued with the doctor when he urged me to check in for surgery there and then.
I didn't really argue about it, however. No-one had likened him to Hewson at that point and I was inclined to trust him, a symptom of girlishness that has disappeared along with all the other symptoms now that I have his bill.
The operation cost $1,246 but not everyone was impressed. "That's nothing,"said Sun-Herald cartoonist Jenny Coopes. "I took a cat to the vet to get it shaved and it cost $103 ..."
© 1992 The Sun Herald