I am your mother

You won’t recognise me now, curled up on a metal hospital cot. I look like a frightened bird or an old lady, neglected, then hit by a stroke, demented by my socio-economic status and the family war it has caused.

You might not think I’m a person. Bag of bones, flowery hospital apron covering my front but not my back. I am unfolded by the bright lights, frightened and delusional.

Here I am. A tiny speck of me holding on to life, microscopically resilient to probing. They have scanned me and drugged me and I’m on a drip. I can’t swallow, they tell me. Yet I had a cup of tea before I came in.

Help me, my children, all of you together. Help them interpret my life as a mysterious possibility. Let them know that their diagnostic certainties are only part of what life is about. Have the courage now to get me have the information I need. I’m hungry for my life.


How can I talk to you? You always knew best. My daughter, my first child. I made you my confidante, my help mate, my advocate. You with the bright eyes, you who could always pop round to xxxxxxxx’s after dad died when the lights went out and I needed a shilling. I taught you to read before you went to school, I taught you about fairness above all things. I taught you to think but never wanted you to act. I taught you to wait for the others, taught you to reflect, be resourceful in the ever changing now that was my world. You can’t change things daughter and yet I hoped you’d keep trying.

You’re here now, smiling at me, trying to read me a story. You’ve watched the male nurse administer three large doses of analgesics and blood thinners anally and he hasn’t written them on my drug record card. In a couple of days when I’ve been moved on twice more in the hospital you’ll remember what you saw and wonder whether you should have said something. By then though, the doors will be forever shut on this part of my medical journey and I will be somewhere else in the hospital.

I look dead on arrival here. The ward is labelled ‘fast track’ stroke care, but again, you will discover that this is no longer the fast track ward and that many of the patients are simply held here because there’s nowhere, in what you again discover is really a research lexicon of space possibilities, yet to put them.

You make me angry, genuinely angry, here in this hypocritical well of platitudes. Thank you for making me angry, yet again. Your nosiness, your interfering, tampering with the label of dysfunctionality that the market place has put on families like ours, might make a difference and I thank you, daughter, for being true to yourself.

You’re sitting in an office now with the junior doctor, xxxxxx, who, you will again discover, will be following my progress, mediating the two consultants, one doctor and one senior junior doctor who will look for appropriate timings on the relaying of the appropriate lung cancer diagnosis after I have had the biopsy they plan in three weeks time.

They already know how I am going to die and all your research on autoimmune disorders and drug induced lymphoma like symptoms are in the underbelly of possibilities that there will never be a place to explore as it is morally wrong here to allow a smoker a second chance. Even though 50% of all scans are used in wrong diagnoses.

I’m an example to all the others. My eventual addiction to morphine is my penance to the pharmaceutical giants who prey on the poor in the name of high, clean finance.

But, still you sit with the junior doctor, trying to apply all the communication skills you have learnt to equalising the relationship, looking for a chink of light that noone has considered, where it will be in their interests to let me off their research hook.

I was a smoker after your dad died and you, like the rest of our society, can’t find a way out of the socially biased medical machine that will use lifestyle and nutrition as a death ray weapon in screening and diagnosis, confirming everything that could ever have been rumoured or whispered about the poor and their monstrous waste of taxpayers money.