I am one of the most squeamish people I know when it comes to hospitals. I hate the smells. The unexpected sights. A surgeon's blood-splattered slip-on shoes. Nappies piled neatly on a table beside an older person's bed, writes Róisín Ingle
It's as though I resent being reminded of what actually goes on there and I find this resentment hard to hide. If I needed to go to hospital and wanted a friendly face to go with me I would be the last person I'd call.
So take pity on my mother. Over the past few years, every time she has ended up in hospital it's her hospital-phobic decidedly non-nursey daughter who for some reason has been the one to accompany her. I was with her when she went to the doctors for a routine check-up and he decided she needed a heart scan. I sat petrified and resentful in St Vincent's for an afternoon trying to think of soothing things to say. Mostly, "you'll be grand" if I'm honest, although I didn't know if she would be grand. She was, as it turned out. I, on the other hand, needed a couple of days to recover.
Not long afterwards she had come up to Belfast to visit me and we decided to go to the cinema to watch A Beautiful Mind. We were walking up the steps of the cinema and when I turned around in the dark to ask her which row she fancied, there she was, gone. I followed a muffled groan to discover her lying on the plush carpet mumbling something about her left arm. I can see us now, both whispering in case we disturbed the other patrons' enjoyment of the trailers. "Are you OK?" I whispered. "No, I think it's broken," she whispered back. Embarrassed, I managed to get her up from the floor and lead her out of the cinema, whispering about whether we should get an ambulance to the Royal Hospital. We took a taxi instead.
The first thing I did when we got there was ring my sister. "Rach," I said. "I'm in the hospital with Mother. I think you better come here." The fact that my mother had said she didn't want to bother anyone else was immaterial. I was not about to start playing nurse when there was someone much more qualified at the other end of the phone. I don't think I relaxed until my sister came with her child and her husband and my mother was so full of morphine and we were all making so much noise there was no way she could possibly notice that I was NFN (No Florence Nightingale). We got A Beautiful Mind out on video a few months later. She cried.
The phone rang at around 9 a.m. one morning. "Róisín," she said, "I fell down the stairs at work and. . ." She had broken her other arm. This hospital visit was made slightly more bearable by the fact that as she lay at the bottom of the stairs she had experienced some kind of paranormal event. She had been willing her right arm to move and it couldn't oblige because it was fractured but her mind wanting to grant this fervent wish had presented her with a picture of a right arm moving, even as the broken right arm stayed where it was.
She rubbed her eyes in disbelief and did the same thing again, with the phantom arm humouring her with a repeat performance. At the hospital she was so obsessed with this story, she kept retelling it to anyone who would listen and before I knew it, I was putting her gingerly into a taxi, safe in the knowledge that other nurses would take over when she got home.
Four months later, and the right arm has not healed. An operation is called for. In an operating theatre in St Vincent's, some bone will be taken from her hip and grafted on to her broken arm. Everyone else is at work and though I have deadlines looming I'm moved to action by the thought of her waking up from the anaesthetic all disoriented and frightened.
So against my will, against every unbroken bone in my body, I am there, stomach squirming, as she emerges, an oxygen mask on her face and a drip coming from her arm, looking as confused as a child.
"Am I OK?" she says and I tell her that she is. And she asks me to kiss her, so I do on the forehead. I stroke her hair like I remember her doing to me when I was young. I listen to the nurses in the ward sympathising with this lady about her frail hips and that young girl about her accident. Smiling and joking and cajoling even as they empty out bedpans and listen to pain and wipe away blood. I think they are some of the most incredible people I've ever seen. And I think I am one of the most cowardly.
But then I tell myself I am here. And I don't believe her, but my Mother says that's enough.