I’M JUST FINE DOC

Informer takes his place in the queue at the hospital and gets through it, thanks to a heavy, sustained dose of A-grade humour

THE old woman is stooped and convulsing, her cough a drum roll. Her daughter says her mum has lung cancer and, while that may have been true once, all evidence is the disease now has her.

Eyes streaming, she scans the packed waiting room, leans on her walking frame and asks, grinning: “Anyone got a smoke? I’m dying for a fag.”

Hospital humour is like her lungs, filled with a black and inevitable truth. Sometimes the only way to deal with pain, foolishness, grief, hope, loss and uncertainty is to mock them. Hospital humour is defiance and confession.

Informer was in hospital the other day. No, this was not some emergency arising from last Sunday’s Gold Coast Airport half marathon.

I’m chuffed to say everything went according to my running plan, in that I finished upright and before August.

If you must know, I was there to fulfil an ongoing obligation to a longitudinal health study for which I’ve been a guinea pig since the age of seven. Every few years, oodles of Tasmanians born in that vintage year of 1961 front up to hospitals throughout Australia for a few hours of prodding and probing.

Unsurprisingly, when I arrive the waiting room is filled with sick and damaged people. Ailments are many and the ailing span genders, ages and walks of life.

Accompanying the old woman’s bung lungs is an old man’s crook hip, several people toting oxygen tanks and masks like some bizarre scuba team, a skeletal addict, screaming babies, people being eaten away from within and without, an abundance of broken bones, strains and sprains, and one tradie who’s shot himself in the leg with a nail-gun.

Attitudes also run the gamut, with impatient patients juxtaposed by others seemingly content not to be summoned at all, as if waiting to hear the worst is preferable to being told it. However, one by one we are called by the chirpy desk nurse who asks: “And how are we today?”

“Not bad, love. Two tries at the weekend. Tried to enjoy a beer on the sly and tried to outrun this one when she caught me mid-swig. Failed both times,” says an elderly man. His wife wears an expression I suspect is shared by many family carers: exhausted and tireless.

Earlier, she tells Mrs Informer they left the farm outside Bundaberg at 3am to make her husband’s appointment.

His wheelchair is laden with bags, cardigans and whatnot and he sports bandages that dress the ulcers on his legs but cannot prevent the colour of decay from seeping through.

“Hilarious, isn’t he?” she tells the nurse. “I don’t suppose we’re anywhere near a steep ramp, are we, love? I could put him out of our misery.”

Apart from when I was born and the wise men dropped by, Informer has spent only one night in hospital (touch Mrs Informer’s head), the result of my belly button popping out to say “Ahoy there” while I was descending from the topmast of the replica of Cook’s Endeavour.

That time I became the subject of hospital humour – Mrs Informer wrote “naval hernia” on the admission form – but generally hospital is no laughing matter.

“Hello, Informer. Thanks for coming in. How are you?” asks the doctor when it is my turn, and I reply with two words that most in the waiting room cannot say today and some may not say again.

I look the doctor in the eyes and tell him, with enormous relief and all joking aside: “I’m well.”

HOSPITAL HUMOUR IS LIKE HER LUNGS, FILLED WITH A BLACK AND INEVITABLE TRUTH