Hospital Visiting

Back in January I wrote a post about going to the shiny new Pinderfields Hospital in Wakefield to pick up my grandmother's prescription. It was interesting to observe people in that atmosphere. My grandmother's currently hospitalised and the opportunities for people-study have been numerous in the last week. While it's easy to see humanity sometimes as an inconsiderate mass intent on getting in your way, something like sitting in a four-bed hospital room reminds you of the personal stories behind the mass.

I'm fortunate that my grandmother's a bit of a gossip. However, she's also rather deaf, meaning that her attempts to repeat things in a whisper usually end up being louder than she anticipated. Nevertheless, she has imparted some interesting things. The woman in the bed across seems friendly enough to me; always has a load of visitors around her, more than she's probably supposed to have. However, earlier this week she was apparently in tears during afternoon visiting because nobody turned up to see her. My grandmother comforted her and relayed all this to me in a loud whisper when I went to see her. I don't know if a phone call had been made from the patient but, by the time evening visiting rolled around, she was surrounded with half the extended family. Maybe the woman was insecure and lonely on her own, maybe she was afraid of abandonment. Maybe she's a cow that the rest of the family want shut away in the hospital for a while. Who knows? I want to - but I won't get to.

There are a couple of other notable stories I've picked up on. The woman in the bed diagonal to my grandmother has a neurotic son who concedes to her every selfish whim. The woman in the final bed is a chatterbox who tries to monopolise everyone else's visitors because she doesn't seem to get any of her own. Last night a man tried to go to the toilet behind the nurse's station. On Wednesday night I witnessed a nurse leading another elderly man back into the lobby and making him empty his pockets. It looked like he was making a break for it.

Hopefully, my grandmother won't be in for much longer. However, I have to admit, I'll miss the intriguing aspects of visiting her. There are hundreds of stories waiting for discovery around that hospital.

Staking Out A Hospital Waiting Room

It wasn't a deliberate exercise.

Today I volunteered to collect my grandmother's prescription from the new super hospital in Wakefield. Although she lives close to it she would've had to take a taxi there and back which seemed ridiculous. As I'm perfectly able-bodied I took the two-mile walk instead.

It was the first time I'd been inside the new hospital. It felt like walking into an airport, all bright lights and sparkling floors. It was a far cry from the dingy corridors of the old wards. Exciting to me at this point was the coffee bar dead ahead but I restrained myself, located the dispensary and took a seat.

What I didn't realise at first was that the seating area I was sat in was the main waiting hub for the entire building. People had to watch the screen to let them know they were allowed to move to the next seating area, the one closer to their ward. A bit of a dictatorship, I thought to myself, and an intelligent way of keeping the complaining patients away from the people actually involved in their department.

In the forty-five minute interval before my prescription was made up I got to listen to some interesting conversations. I learned all about the ailments of the man next to me, despite never looking up from my book. I listened as the old man with a cane across from me was taken away from his seat by an impatient nurse only to be returned five minutes later and plonked back down again. I heard the whining about waiting times for prescriptions morph into loud admonishments of the poor dispensary staff. I found that the ringtone of the grey-haired woman in front of me was a quote from 300. I even learned that the reason the prescriptions were taking so long was because they'd built the dispensary too far from the pharmacy itself. Having people go downstairs to get their medicine there was unrealistic - it was next door to the mortuary and, as the receptionist cheerfully pointed out, it wasn't the best place for a good odour.

All in all, it was an interesting afternoon. I feel like going back for another go, maybe just to get a coffee and listen to people. Those folk in that hospital are my people; their accents and voices are the ones I hear in my head as I write. I'm a Northerner. Maybe it's time I got back to listening to Northern folk.

Blogging NaNoWriMo 2010: The Kick-Off Gathering

In the spirit of documenting my NaNo experience this year, I decided to start with the kick-off party I (quite bravely) attended in Leeds today.

Now I'm certainly not a mix-in kinda girl but, as I've previously said, I intend to become a social bunny this November and I'm trying to immerse myself in the feeling and spirit of NaNo as much as possible. So with that in mind (and after a lot of dithering) I attended the meet-up at the West Yorkshire Playhouse today.

The tradition was to take a piece of fruit along for recognition (and nutritional extra bonuses). I duly collected my apple from the market in Wakefield and hopped on a bus. When I got to the Playhouse I joined a table of about seven others all clutching various pieces of fruit. A few minutes later the influx of people who had met at the train station began and our number swelled. We had to move tables.

Well, the twenty five plus of us gathered in a large circle and proceeded to give a brief introduction to ourselves: forum name, previous NaNoWriMos attempted and won, a fact about ourselves and a fact about our novel. This had forced some pretty serious thinking from me the previous night about how I could condense my plot into a summary (a useful exercise for any writer). Essentially, my novel is that a teenage girl is dumped at a service station and the story progresses through seven perspectives as she makes herself at home, showing each character in various lights. Easy!

After the 'official' introductions we broke up to mingle (having been moved by the staff again by this point). Now, me being me, I was too shy to do much. I let people come to me which meant I only spoke to six people while I was there. At times I felt myself slipping back into my shell and forced my way violently out of it as best I could.

I did excuse myself fairly early (who passes up a free pub meal at home?) but I came away with the knowledge that there are some very strange writers in Yorkshire (some of whom stole my apple to adorn a fruit sculpture and for all I know are still keeping it hostage), and that there are a lot of people out there who just want to write while having fun doing it.

Am I glad I went? Yes. It was a social experience, and while I didn't make the absolute most of it that I could've, I did utilise it a bit. If nothing else I've learned that I can stand up in front of a large group and talk for twenty seconds.

That'll be handy for a future university lecturer...