Florence Nightingales?

Been really down in the dumps of late. Health was bad, a lot f doubts abut the future – and that is terrible: I mean starting to doubt about yourself and your future. Spent a few days in a hospital, the only decent one available in the locality, and found that they could kill you more than heal you. The nurses are so raw, they can’t insert a canula into the body, and they talk all the while, wear dirty uniforms. It’s like this: you have this medical emergency, you are vomiting and passing stools like water without restraint and these girls keep chattering to themselves while inserting tubes in the body, making comments like, “tch”, “the vein is crooked”, and you wonder if you are so abnormally sick already that you are going to die. Where’s their objectivity? It’s the pits you know, and you feel so uncertain whether you would come out of it alive. And then along comes a senior nurse and inserts the canula in a jiffy and you realise it was the ignorance of the rookie nurses that made them make such inconsiderate comments to a traumatised man. Really they should create some standards about nursing and only register them after testing them properly.

The whole thing is because you assume they are the people who know and when they make such comments you think: they know the whole truth, and the truth is: “this man is going to die, look at him, all his veins are crooked.” Actually it isn’t so, they are showing off their youthful insouciance and good health, and sneering at you for being sick, and suddenly you feel this terrible sense of being on the verge of dying. On looking back, what made them so supercilious about their ignorance and their good health? Weren’t they sick like this in their own lives?

I know, I know, I can’t blame them because they are badly paid, have little education or experience and their bad manners reflect it. But I feel this attitude of looking down upon a sick person is nauseating and lacks human sympathy. Are these the people on whom you are going to trust your life? You get the impression that they are out to kill you rather than heal you. Those girls left me terribly disoriented and sicker than I was, not to talk of raising in me the monsters of doubt.