Wrong Room 101

Let’s make life fun. Let’s turn all little miss-haps into something positive. Learn to laugh at yourself! These words are disgustingly familiar as the ones I try and live my life by. But frankly, sometimes it’s kinda hard even for those that laugh easily, to laugh at everything.

This week has been hectic. I have kept unsociable hours, my life has been turned into a merry go ‘round of car, hospital, home, car, hospital, home- and the only way to get off the dizzying ride was to close your eyes, wish upon a night time star and await the morning call.

My grandmother had a hip replacement operation, which if you’re anything like me will send your imagination into overdrive. I imagined the surgeon rocking the table with the saw in one hand and the flaps of thigh skin moving in the wind of the air conditioned operating theatre. Nurses at the ready to take the piece of bone that was being taken out, chuck it to a pack of waiting dogs and replace it with a steel tube, which by the way, is said to eventually fuse with the real bone of the leg and become at one with it. Now, the only way I imagine this happening is if you put the steel tube in with superglue at either end…apparently it doesn’t work that way. Also, it is not a steel tube, but one made of Teflon. I say Teflon, you think frying pan with a hotspot in the middle? No? Well I did.

Suffice to say the operation I imagined would take a few hours and then a few more for her to come around after the anesthetic. But no, 30 minutes and the Teflon had been slipped in and she was wheeled to a room of her own, on the same floor as the gypsies.

Ahh the gypsies! The entire family/troop/brood/football team/clan took up the downstairs waiting area. Four gypsy generations sat there as hospital life whizzed past them. The men differing in height and size, but all in black. The women, half of which were toting a kid on a hip like the latest accessory, all wore platform shoes, differing in height and colour. I believe they were there to keep the Family’s Sacred Grandmother company. I also believe they were a mafia and that somewhere between baby, hip and platform a discrete dagger nestled.

I’ve been taught to cross myself after happening upon a gypsy. And dammit, I did. I’ve also been taught not to stereotype. And dammit, I’m working on it.

My grandfather went to visit one day. He parked, he walked past all the gypsies, got into the lift and got out when the doors slid open, made his way down the corridor and arrived at the room. Waiting there for him was not my grandmother surrounded by her home comforts, (because in this family we do not travel lightly anywhere), but instead, the blinds were drawn, the bed was empty and had been made and a printed note lay on the starched sheet, stating that the patient had been taken into surgery for a heart operation.

Now, my grandfather also has a delicate heart and the poor sod kept it beating whilst he turned on his heel and frog marched his way to the nurse’s station to find out just what in God’s name had happened to his wife, her hip and now her heart! The nurses offered little information, each claiming to know less than the first and each promising to ring somewhere and find out.

Whilst the promises and the telephonings were going on, the poor man walked himself back to the room only to find three more people had appeared. They all stared at each other. And then my grandfather asks, “Are you from here?” Make of that what you will. Are you from the hospital? Were you born here? Is this room where it all began for you? Are you au fait with the law of the land regarding this room? I can only assume he was in shock and a question had to be thrown out and some sort of an answer had to be produced. Finally, one piped up, “You’re not from here, you’re from the 3rd floor.” All hospital visitors speak the same lingo apparently.

And indeed; grandmother was found, home comforts strewn everywhere, hip still Teflon, heart intact and mystery solved. This was the only politically correct giggle of the week and since then, I have scrubbed clean the scrawl across his forehead which read, “3rd floor.”