The High Technology Medical Centre was like something out of an A24 film, surreal in a bad way. The nurses and doctors they were locked in some perpetual fight and so, naturally could not attend to patients, they gathered and dispersed and exchanged angry words while messily munching on sunflower seeds, cracking open the matte black shells and discarding them in neat piles on work surfaces, a nurse reclined on a vacant bed, another lobbed a used syringe over me and into the bin. The wall by the bin was splattered with blood left by the syringes that missed the bin and ricocheted off the edge. “Look,” I said, “there are bloody syringes on the floor” “oh yeah” they replied. I pointed out a previous patient’s blood upon my bed as they laid the equipment for my IV drip next to the red smears. “Oh yeah!” they said. The ruddy faced nurse who I’d recently spied snapping open a glass vial of some drug… (morphine?) and swigging from it, came over with a large syringe for my IV drip. “What is that?” I asked, shifting nervously, “I don’t speak English” she replied. What I had really meant to say was: “Get away from me!”.
Everything was done with cool nonchalance and no explanation. The groaning sallow granny in the corner suddenly had a fat black tube with a torch at the end casually pushed into her mouth and down into her stomach, her jaw was clamped open with some white foam, she made a strange, muffled whining sounds and writhed about while they held her down and exchanged jokes about something that was not in my language. The willowy Russian woman’s frail body was almost invisible under the covers until 2 male nurses ambled over (my bed was far too close), I stole a glance as they whipped off her sheets, her trousers, I turned away and closed my eyes... I stole another glance as they groped around inside her bald waxen vagina. When she cried out in agony my reaction was to shakily stand up, wheel my IV drip to the corner where I stood facing the wall and waiting, maybe it was because I felt like it was one less invasion of her space? Should I have intervened? They finally left her with a tube leading from her vagina to a bag on the floor which rapidly filled with her urine. She cried to herself. I gave her a weird, terrified smile, I didn’t even ask if she was OK… because I figured she couldn’t speak English? Why didn’t I ask if she was OK?
I had ridden into this hell in a pristine Fisher Price ambulance, with a lovely combination of bright turquoise, canary yellow and cream for the interior, it was strangely empty of equipment but clean as Virtual Reality and with kindly ladies in proper outfits, and then they wheeled me into total human degradation.
I wonder how it had got to this point. Are these people even real doctors? Is this even a real hospital I wonder? This experience could be useful if you are writing a script for a surreal horror movie about a post-apocalyptic world where care is no longer a human quality. Definitely not a place for actual sick people to go.