We will all come here, in the end. An NHS waiting room. Even if you are rich, or lucky, not everyone you know is – and so you will be here, one day. This waiting room. It was here before you were born, and will be here after you die. You don’t just wait in the waiting room. The waiting room waits for you.
Patient or carer – which one of you is more scared? You’re playing a game called “Being brave for each other”, which requires sitting in this room and talking to each other in a slightly too bright manner: as if the words have grainy crystals in them, rather than their usual mammalian flow. The words are fractionally too fast, fractionally too shiny. You are pretending to be in a film where you engage in gallows-humour banter. You are Bruce Willis in Die Hard or Ripley in Alien. You are them – because they dealt with great terror with aplomb, and they were alive in the final reel. That’s a role you would both like now. You would both like to know you will be there when the credits roll. The hero doesn’t die. The funny guy lives. So you make jokes about the old, tatty magazines, the poignantly self-critical posters on the wall: “Tell us what we’re getting wrong!”
“What you’re getting wrong is that you’re not a Pizza Express. We would be happier in there.”
The person who makes jokes about Pizza Express will be fine. If you’ve got the right script, you’ll be triumphant.
What are you being brave about? When you walked through the main doors – past the smokers in dressing gowns: the living embodiment of “Ah, f*** it, it’s too late now” – it was mental health to the left, broken bodies to the right. A misfiring thought; an arrhythmic heart; a dark cluster of trouble on an x-ray, or in your dreams – they’re all the same, really. In the vastness of the universe – in the limitless, still-exploding wastes of space – your whole life now centres on something almost invisibly tiny: a hairline fracture. Something the size of a grain of rice, in the wrong place. A few drops too few of serotonin. A few drops too many of cortisol. A tiny thing is wrong, and it has brought you to your knees. It threatens your very you.
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And so now this huge building – these corridors and lifts and nurses and specialists; these machines and cafés and porters and machines – will try to wrap its giganticness around you, and mend this tiny, wrong thing. This hospital – the size of a cruise ship – is going to attempt the magic of getting inside you, and battling with this thing that you yourself cannot touch. How odd – that you cannot get inside your own self, but that this building will. How frustrating that application, and sheer force of will, cannot change things now – for it always has before, in work, in your education, in your house. Your cupboards are neat, you’ve been promoted and you can speak French – but you cannot graft your way out of this malaise.
Wellness, you reflect, is like love. You can do everything you can to encourage it – to make it likely to happen – but you cannot command it or summon it at will. It is, ultimately, a random gift. That you weep for, in horror, when you lose.
In the waiting room, you cannot work out if we are in an age of miracles or still cavemen, fighting plagues with a stick. You’ve walked past the machinery – the facilities, in every bed bay, for keeping a human alive. The sockets on the wall for resuscitation kits; the drips and the dialysis and the ventilators. Chunky plastic and metal – the same materials we make toy trucks out of, or picnic sets. That is the best we have yet invented to replace the miracle of honeycomb bone, pulsing vein, logical mind and airy lung. These chunky, brutal things.
But, yet, they keep you alive – bring you back from the dead. Deliver you back to your daughters, and your husbands, and your parents – when, in another decade, they would have buried you or lost you to an asylum.
So we are between ages, you think. In the crossing point between primitivism and miracles. That is where we are. It would be worse to be in the past – but so much better to be in the future. You would like to get to the future. That is why you are in this NHS waiting room today. You are queuing to buy a ticket for the only train that will take you there.
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And these people, in this place – the doctors, the nurses, the consultants, the shrinks – that is what they have all signed up to do. The astonishing people who work the long dawns and the exploding nights. They are trying to put as many people as they can on the trains, out of this waiting room. That is their vocation. They are conductors on the soul train. They are desperate to watch you leave.
caitlin.moran@thetimes.co.uk