ROOM SIX

They switch off the lights. It's after lunch. Rest period. Visitors expelled, phone silenced, curtains drawn.

Peace settles like a white butterfly amid a charivari of sound.

Then a vacuum cleaner drones. Up and down. Up and down. And into the room and under beds and chairs and metal mobile stands and out again into the hallway. And up and down…

'If he does that again tomorrer, I'm going to tell him to piss orrf.' My roomate, Joan, snarls. She's Irish, from the Far West of NSW. Collapsed on holidays, far from home, away from family. She's scared shitless.

'It's the law of hospitals,' I say. Hospitals have a universal law of their own, like computers and Murphy.

The drain which carries away my bodily fluids must be evacuated and measured at midnight. With the lights turned on. It's hospital lore. A sacred rite.

And who am I to question the rites of healing? Don't I, too, rely on my own rites and superstitions to invoke and promote these same magical powers?

Diagonally across from me, Daphne is keeping her chin up. She cannot lower her head even to cut up her food without a thudding great headache pounding her brain. After seven years the brain stem tumour, inoperable and unstoppable, has taken control of her life. It dictates what she can and cannot do.

Everyone in this hospital has seen the chocolate box photos of her granddaughter swathed in tulle and pearls for the wedding that Daphne missed because she can no longer be transported in elevators.

'When I could no longer write-even my name-' Daphne says with chilling calm. 'That's when it really became difficult…'

'You're like a saint, Daphne,' I say. 'I couldn't be this patient.'

'Life's a bloody bugger,' says Joan. She fears her husband will forget her while she's away. Even at home in the far west she travels regularly three hours each way to visit him at his lodge for Alzheimer's sufferers.

We all know she is worrying that he is upset because she doesn't come to visit and every now and then that other even worse fear runs shuddering through her being.

In this room we tune into the collective unconscious, things are known that are not said. When it is necessary to say these things aloud we are respectful, considerate, accurate. We know the fragility of courage. The rest of the time we are rude, irreverent, raucous.

For Leanne it's the breast. 'The best kind,' she says and grins. An atheist, she wears a shirt printed with Shit Happens. Her personal abyss contains a sister, misdiagnosed, dead these two years, the anniversary next week. We know she thinks of this sister as she recovers from her own surgery. Scar upon scar. There is no pathos in her gratitude only gladness and joy.

At night I dream I smash through a window, float out into the cool night. Into stirring air, stirring life. I wake to the whirr of an air conditioner. Life, here, is controlled by machines. And still I thank god, or whomever, even for this. While knowing full well that as we benefit from all this wonderful technology we also pay the price of being guinea pigs in the continual search for knowledge.

We try not to become self absorbed. Try to measure our loss against the greater loss of others. Try to remember there is vibrant, vital life out there and we are very much part of it.

I've written a haiku,' Leanne announces.

We wait expectantly.

A bubble afloat

room 6, bed 13

Published Pulling Up The Blind (Australia);  Illness Journal (USA);
Recorded on The 1998 Commonwealth Broadcasting Association CD
(UK) at the BBC in London by actor Darlene Johnson for broadcast on radio stations around the Commonwealth 1998-2008