Hospitals

I've been trying to work out why it is that I get so stressed by the thought of going into a hospital building - or, indeed, of having anything at all to do with the medical profession. After all, they're there to help you, aren't they?

Nevertheless, even the briefest idea that a doctor or hospital may be about to come into focus in my life sends me into a blind panic. I didn't realise until quite recently that not everyone feels this way. "Well," they say, calmly, "you're having a check-up to make sure everything's ok. And if it isn't, they'll catch it early and sort it out." I know that! I don't need anyone to tell me why I'm going to have a check-up. My worry really isn't anything to do with that. Apart from the fact that it's an invasive procedure and that impertinent questions are asked, that really isn't the point. It's taken a long time to get there, but I've worked out the cause of my fear of all things medical; what I do about it, however, is another matter. And what, I hear you cry, is the cause, then?

One of my earliest memories - from when I was 6 or 7 years old - is of waking in the night to hear strange voices on the landing outside my bedroom. I opened the door, and I could see my father lying on the floor, covered by a blanket, my mother looking terribly anxious and a family friend, who was also a doctor at our local practice, was talking on the telephone, giving details of my father's age and the address. An ambulance came, and my father was taken away, my mother following behind in her car. The doctor took me home with him to stay with his family. Nobody told me what was happening and the next day, at last, I was taken home to hear that my father was dangerously ill in hospital, having suffered a haemorrhage of some sort as a result of accidentally overdosing on aspirin in a cold cure. Eventually, at the insistence of another of the doctors in the practice, another old, family friend, I was taken to visit my father in hospital. I don't remember much about that visit, apart from the fact that my father was clearly very ill and that I hated the noise and the smell of the place. He got well again, of course, but then, when I was 13 or so, he had a massive stroke while we were on holiday; more hospitals, more worry, more tears when nobody was around to see them. Again, he came home, but a changed man - paralysed down one side. Though he taught himself to walk again, things were never the same; the shadow of hospitals hung over us from that time forward. My grandparents were next; they went to hospital, they came home. They didn't recover. Then my mother; another emergency in the night. Home again. My father, some tests. A massive heart attack a couple of hours before he was due to come home. He never did. And in the four years before her death, I accompanied my mother to Accident and Emergency on numerous occasions for unexplained breathlessness, bleeding from the mouth, endless rounds of tests, none of which showed anything, she claimed, refusing to let me come to see the consultants with her. At last, an asthma attack, a desperate dash in an ambulance, lights flashing, sirens blaring, me following behind in my car this time. A slight recovery and then, while I was getting a cup of tea, a mini-death. They brought her back, they took her to intensive care; another slight recovery and then a phone call in the night; she couldn't tolerate the oxygen mask so she'd been 'intubated'. Two weeks later, no improvement; a tracheotomy. After 56 days with many midnight calls to the hospital - they wouldn't let me stay in the relatives' room after the first week - she died among the noise, the constant lights and far from the home she loved. It wasn't a dignified death. Not the death she would have wanted. Not the death I would have wanted for her, if I'd been able to choose.

So, my life has been punctuated by emergencies; I don't equate hospitals with happy events. I don't equate seeing medical personnel with happy events. Maybe I shouldn't be so surprised, then, that I have a tendency to see the medical profession as 'the enemy'. So, now I've worked that one out, I need to think about how to deal with it, since my own life is now punctuated by hospital visits...