Painful rites in Waiting Area 3
My appointment was for 1.30pm. I swear the hospital has doubled in size since I last visited. In through its many doors went the broken and the sick, all there to confess, in the unimprovable words of Philip Larkin, ‘‘that something has gone wrong’’.
It’s disconcerting to see so much mortal decay. With one breath I vowed to take up the gymnasium and vegan muesli, and with the next to double my commitment to all vices and go out in a riot of pleasure.
At Outpatients – oh the blessedness of a prefix – I asked for the urology clinic and was directed down the corridor to Waiting Area 3.
I’d expected to find a nurse who’d run a urine test. I hadn’t expected to find a dozen silent men. Seeing no receptionist, I sat. The men were all my age or thereabouts.
A nurse came in. ‘‘Any latecomers?’’ I raised a shy hand.
She indicated a trolley laden with jugs of water. ‘‘You’ll need to drink at least six cups.’’
It was only then that I noticed that every man was sipping from a flimsy plastic beaker. It transpired that the urine test required a minimum of 100ml. It was up to each of us to decide when we’d be good for that much, whereupon we headed for the nurse’s lair and the unseen testing apparatus.
The rub, however, was that if you ran dry at 90ml and couldn’t coax another drop, you failed the test and had to go back to the water jugs and start again. So the urge to get up and try your luck in a bid to get away was balanced by the fear of having to stay another hour in Waiting Area 3.
How much was 100ml? I presumed a 10th of a litre, which would be a fifth of one of those halflitre swindler’s pints. I imagined myself standing over one. It didn’t help.
My companions were presumably wrestling with the same problem. And we must surely all have been conscious that every one of us was suffering from much the same condition. The prostate was to blame. A dozen grown men had been plucked from the working day by a gland the size of a walnut.
In general life we know each other by our differences, the characteristics that make us individual. But time and the health service know us only by our similarities. Forget Joe or Justinian or His Excellency the Most Worshipful – we are just male organisms aged 61. With prostates to match.
Had we been women we would no doubt have got together within minutes, discussing symptoms, listening, sympathising, baring our feelings, touching each other on the forearm. But we were men. So the jokes started, mostly about the superior diuretic qualities of beer. Not very funny jokes, for sure, but they served to diffuse the general sense of, ‘‘Oh my God, and am I come to this?’’
One man twice got up to go to the nurse then sat back down in hesitation. But others got up and went, and none came back. In the end there were just two left, a genial North Canterbury farmer and myself. I couldn’t drink another drop. ‘‘Wish me luck,’’ I said and stood.
Two minutes later the nurse was holding a printed read-out: ‘‘237 ml,’’ she said. I punched the air as if I’d scored a try.
The world never looks more alluring than when you leave a Waiting Area 3. Although you know you’ll be back. On the drive home I had to stop near bushes. I thought I could hear laughter.