You Meet All Sorts on a Hospital Ward

It’s been about a year since the last of my hospital stays and my operation, and because of this I’ve been taking a trip down memory lane, recalling some of the unpleasant things I had to go through.

My thoughts have been wandering to the time I spent on the Acute Medical Unit ward at the Norfolk & Norwich Hospital when I first went back in. The various AMUs are a little step-up from the Accident and Emergency department. Patients with a wide array of ailments were kept there before they were transferred to specialist units.

For instance, the bed to the left of me in the ward I was in featured an array of characters, a young lad with a kidney complaint, an old boy with a broken leg who ripped down one of my curtains because he felt cold, and another man who ended up urinating in the corridor just outside the door.

To the right of me at first was a quiet bloke who shared the name of one of my dogs, but after he was moved out I was put next to a man who I really didn’t want to be near at all. He was an old boy in his eighties who came in in a wheelchair with two rather burley-looking men clad in black bomber jackets, white shirts and black ties. It all looked rather official at first. Was it someone of importance? Far from it.

I later found out that the old boy had come in from the local prison, and the two burley-looking men were his guards. He was there being treated for a heart condition, and to be honest with you I felt quite sorry for the chap, because he was obviously in a great deal of distress.

Being the nosey so-and-so I was I kept an ear open to try and find out who he was and what he’d done, mainly because I found it quite amusing that this little old man was being guarded by two brick walls as it were.

I found out the old boy’s name the following day, and with the help of Google I looked him up to see just who he was and what he’d done. As soon as those results appeared on my phone I lost all sympathy for him entirely.

It turned out that laughing boy next to me was doing time because he was a paedophile, having been thrown inside for historical and more recent crimes. I won’t go into the details here, but needless to say that I felt quite uncomfortable with him just a few feet away, even though he was an old man and not exactly in the best of health.

His health problems didn’t stop him from being a colossal pain in the backside. He may have been “oh woe is me” at first, but it wasn’t long before he began to turn a few tricks in order to get some attention, the most unpleasant of which saw him pouring the contents of his urine bottle over his bed. At first he claimed this was an accident, even though it was obvious to the guards that this was a deliberate act.

But the thing that really annoyed me was this: during my time in the AMU my heart developed an irregular beat again, and I was hooked up to a couple of machines to monitor my heart and blood pressure. These machines often made noise when my heart went of a certain number of beats per minutes, and this didn’t sit too well with the dirty old man next door, who at one time said “I wish those fucking things would shut up!” Upon hearing this I was tempted to have a right go at him, but given what I was being monitored for it wouldn’t have been a good idea.

Thankfully, I was moved away from him and transferred to one of the specialist thoracic wards. I really don’t think I could have lasted much longer with that dirty old man next to me. Given the way he’d acted up at times I couldn’t help but think that it would have been better if they’d put him in a room of his own instead of on a ward with other patients.

So what happened to him? To be honest I have no idea, and I really don’t care. If he’s no longer with us I hope that he’s somewhere nice and warm, if you know what I mean.