Spirited sisters are just the thing to keep me stable

“HAPPY Birthday!” sang the nurses round the patient with the mystery illness in the next bed to me.

They are a cheerful lot. I don’t know how they keep up their spirits in the face of so much suffering. But they do.

I was back in Airedale General Hospital, in the Acute Assessment Unit, after a recurrence of chest pain associated with aortic dissection.

It wasn’t a long stay, just overnight for tests, including an immediate CT scan at 2.40am to check there wasn’t a disaster in the offing.

The details are boring, so I won’t bother – though do I hear you saying that’s never prevented me in the past?

Verdict: The Thing (as I call it) is stable, which is good but not as good as it could be because I’d prefer it wasn’t there at all. And I am grateful for the ministrations of a junior sister who bathed blood from my scalp and closed the gash from the fall with glue.

That was new, as was her title. Do they have male sisters? No, they have charge nurses, and there is even talk of giving this title to both sexes. Heresy! Has anybody told bossy Hattie Jacques?

My bed was next to the medics station, so there was a constant cabaret of conversation. Fascinating, to an old hack. And the familiar traffic of the ward: pill trolleys, blood pressure trolleys, food trolleys. Wheels upon wheels.

The grub was better than I remember, but no TV or radio in this ward. Obviously a medical clearing house.

I leave clutching my discharge notification, to be added to the bulging file kept by Sister Sowter, aka Mrs R.

Where would I be without the sisterhood?