My alarming experience
ELF and safety gone mad. You hear it often—and it’s true. Calling the wretched dogma after a small pointy-eared fairy in fancy dress doesn’t make it better. The goal of health and safety appears to be to eliminate all risk from our lives, which is laudable, but impossible— remove one risk and another appears or, in my case, remove one risk and create another.
I’ve been in hospital for (I hope) a brief stay to sort out a swollen left leg caused, apparently, by an infection. The cure has been to fill me full of antibiotics, vitamins for energy and, the killer, a socking great litre bag of saline water, which slowly drips into my arm. I’m currently on my second litre.
The plastic bag, which looks like a diseased hand of bananas, hangs from a kind of iron hat rack on wheels. At the other end, there’s a cannula fed by a plastic tube attached to my wrist. This is a nifty bit of invention and means that I don’t need multiple injections. The problem is that the water on the hat rack and my arm are unavoidably connected, which is like having a grumpy, ill-behaved dog on the end of a surgically attached lead. I call him Arthur.
Arthur and I have been together now for several days and nights. I get caught up in his tubes like Laocoön and the serpents and can’t wear jackets or sweaters without going into contortions.
Worse is the intervention of the Elf. Arthur, which comes with an electric alarm attached to a wall plug, is, they tell me, there to count the drips of water that go into my arm. It’s so sensitive that, if I move my arms about—or even my head— a loud alarm goes off.
I woke last night at 3am, having had a dream in which I was in a lemon grove where the trees were performing a fandango. The reality was less musical: it was the alarm ringing loudly and probably alerting the whole hospital—so I turned it off. Two minutes later, it turned itself on again. This went on for more than an hour, until I threatened to pull the wire out of my arm and throw the whole lot onto the nearest rubbish tip.
At that point, it would stop counting the drops of water, but there were only a couple of tablespoons left, which seemed unimportant compared to a decent night’s sleep, for everyone.
Why, I asked, did the drops need to be counted and why was the alarm so sensitive that bells sounded and lights flashed if I shifted my arm when I was asleep? And why was the control board so complicated that it needed an expert to work it?
There was a button that said ‘Stop’, which didn’t stop anything at all for more than a minute or so, and there were arrows up, down and sideways, which, when pressed, did nothing visible, as well as buttons with hieroglyphics on them. The alarm could not be stopped. I had to threaten the staff at the hospital with removing it or I would go mad.
This machine falls into the same trap as dustbin carts that make a bleeping sound when they reverse. The idea, apparently, is that children are warned about the cart’s change in direction and move away. If I know children, they’re just as likely to be attracted by the bells and move closer.
The infernal din inflicted on us by the bells and whistles of sundry alarms is particularly bad in hospital. Intensive care is so full of noises that it’s like Babel—even an ordinary ward is hardly silent. Flowers are, apparently, banned.
Can we have a rethink on what is healthy and safe?
‘The alarm went on for more than an hour, until I threatened to pull the wire out of my arm