THERE are no specific visiting hours in a private hospital, so people come and go all day to the four bed ward. My friend says many of them could only be described as visitors from Hell. Good natured, caring, travelling long distances, anxious about the welfare and recovery of the people they are coming to visit, they can wear out the patient and raise the blood pressure on the chart at the same time.
She doesn't know whether it would be better to have just two hours a day when people could come. That would make a lot of demands on other peoples' generosity - they would have to reorganise their own work times, school schedules, buses, traffic, baby minders.
Also, if you have two or three people who don't know each other then you, the patient, are the one common denominator and you have to act as some kind of hostess, introducing them and begging them not to go just because they found others there.
Nowadays, she says, it isn't a matter of hospital visitors eating your grapes - that would be relatively harmless and you could keep a supply topped up for them. No, they come with their own theories. You tell them about the tests and treatment that has been ordered for you and they shake their heads. This is totally the wrong way to go, surgery, antibiotics, medication ... these will only poison and defile you. What you really need and should have been told about is - and then the list of alternative suggestions comes out nettle leaves that will cure a burst appendix; vitamins that will take the cataracts off your eyes; 55 cloves of garlic a day and you won't have to worry about that hysterectomy. A spoon of this, a rub of that, a swim in the Forty Foot. A diet with no calcium or nothing but calcium.
And around the little ward, the visitors think they are helping those they have come to see.
Not one of the four women in those beds ridicules alternative medicine many have used it to good effect. But it is the arrogant, inappropriate claims of many of its fringe adherents that depresses them.
It is hard enough to accept the miracles of laser, key hole and nuclear medicine without being made to feel irresponsible and foolish because you didn't walk barefoot through cowslips, drinking vinegar and powdered acorns.
And yet at every bed they heard it, people who had taken two buses to see them saying thoughtfully that meditation might have been the better route to take, and that a lot of so called illness is just stress in another form. All of it kindly meant and coming, as I realise ruefully, under the heading of Unasked For Advice.
There's also something about visiting people in hospital which acts as some kind of trigger to tell your own hospital story. The time you were left on a trolley in the corridor for half an hour, or when you came round after the operation and tried to get your coat and leave the premises. Visitors tell of terrible experiences, inedible food, marvellous food that made them put on half a stone, saintly nurses, disillusioned nurses, clatter and noise or eerie silences. None of these is something a patient wants to hear but there's some Pavlovian instinct that makes the visitor relate them in some woefully misguided feeling of solidarity.
And this week, there was endless discussion among the visitors about whether those in their hospital beds would be better advised to be with the VHI or BUPA. One had to be better than the other, and if one was good, then the other was useless.
Test cases were examined, with more and more mention of, terms like disease, wasting, chronic, age differentials and cash in hand to spend on home assistance. All this brought the patients down and down not only were they sick, but they might be broke if they had the wrong plan.
And the visitors streamed in, beaming and carrying flowers for which there were no vases, or little potted plants, which would die on the window sills of the heated rooms.
I WAS going to get you a whole pile of baby Toblerones," said one visitor to her friend. "But I thought you wouldn't want those so I brought you oranges instead." Everyone, including the visitors, went glum with disappointment. A little basket of miniature chocolate bars would have suited everyone. Five enormous oranges did not. Why did she have to mention what she hadn't brought and drive us all mad? Why did she have to bring enormous oranges which would be very antisocial in a ward?
The ward was coming down with copies of Hello! magazine, each one given with apologies. "I know you wouldn't read it if you were in the whole of your health, but in here, it might help to pass the time." The patients took to hiding the copies they already had, so as not to embarrass the next donor, all of them wondering was the gift some kind of statement that their powers of concentration had now totally gone.
The phrase they hated most was the cheerful, comforting cry: "Let me tell you that you're in the right place, I'd give anything to be in a nice, warm bed in the middle of a cold, wet afternoon."
It's a remark that shouldn't irritate, but it does, the patients say. They feel there's an implication that you, the sick person, are somehow malingering, that you have cunningly arranged to be unwell during the first sleets and winds of winter, that you will be snuggling down for a doze when they are waiting in gales at the bus stop, and that they are the heroic ones, not you.
There's a feeling that the well meaning visitors are somehow minimising the tests, the operation, the treatment, the investigation or whatever it is that has you in there, worried sick at 3 a.m. and mildly anxious but putting on a good face all day.
So what do they like from visitors? I promised them I'd pass on the views of the four women. I was in a good position to do this because I had already brought a copy of Hello!, which fortunately was still in my huge handbag, and had been about to say they were in the right place on a wet day when someone interrupted me.
They made a list of the best visitors and gifts they had seen people who, when others arrived, claimed they had to go and make a phone call/have a smoke/drink a cup of coffee, and did so with conviction; someone who brought the loan of a tape recorder, headphones and three audio books; a voucher from a florist saying a bunch of flowers would be delivered as a "welcome home" present on a day to be named; a canvas tote bag they could hang on the end of the bed or the back of the door to hold papers, Hello! magazine and any other goodies they get; 10 stamped postcards so they could write and thank people for gifts, or tell them they were getting on fine.
GRATEFULLY received also were one of those strings to drape your glasses round your neck - spectacles are always getting lost in hospital beds; people who write nice, cheerful letters full of news and gossip and not discussing the healing powers of dock leaves as opposed to penicillin; a ridiculously expensive drum of talcum powder with its own powder puff, bought between six people in an office; the loan of someone's mobile phone for a week; the promise of videotaping favourite programmes to see afterwards, since visitors and doctors have a habit of coming in at the crucial point of everything on television. People who stay for about five minutes less than they think they should.