Holiday in a Hospital

Cormac MacConnell - The West's Awake

Holiday in a Hospital

January 16, 2008

By Cormac MacConnell

THE wet wind from the west blew my umbrella inside out, snapping several ribs, just as I reached the outpatient entrance to Ennis General Hospital. I was assaulted by large and very cold raindrops for the last couple of yards.

I dumped the broken brolly in a nearby bin and was brushing myself down when I became aware of a sturdy middle-aged lady in a cotton dressing gown standing smoking under the canopy. She was chuckling wholesomely.

“If you have to be in the hospital this is the kind of weather for it you know,” she said.

“You are right for sure. But how do you expect them to cure the likes of you if you are standing outside on a night like this doing your best to catch double pneumonia? Keep smoking like that and you’ll be dead long before you reach 30,” I say.

“That’s the only compliment I got today. Go inside there now like a good man and check yourself in for a couple of days until the bad weather goes away. It’s as warm as toast and the grub is great,” she says.

I joined her for a smoke. We looked out across the cars shining in the rain and chatted for a couple of minutes. She’d recognized me from my radio days and we were like old friends halfway through.

“I was talking to you on the phone one night about the old cures,” she said. ”I was the woman told you about the man in Tipperary that cuts his own hands and puts the blood on you to clear up psoriases and skin conditions.”

I said I remembered that and I did. She said she was getting out today, not a bother on her. A woman, I thought to myself, that will live well past the hundred mark.

I went away upstairs to visit my friend in one of the male wards. Ennis General Hospital, like many of the smaller Irish hospitals, has come under pressure in recent years.

The modern management tendency, here as elsewhere, is to create large regional hospitals with all the very expensive modern devices and to bring the hinterland’s patients into them rather than into the smaller units, always called county hospitals in the past.

The people of Clare, having lost their maternity unit more than a decade ago to Limerick Regional Hospital (no real Clare men are being born anymore!) have been fighting fiercely for the retention of Ennis General as a modern center. And they need to.

I climbed the stairs I’ve so often climbed before down the past 30 years, thinking about things like that. I was visiting very late.

My friend’s ward was up at the top of the house. It was a long warm ward guarded as always by a nurses’ station where a courteous brown-haired nurse told me I could see the patient for about five minutes, but not to stay too long. I wondered what she would think if she knew I had cigars in my pocket for him.

He was down at the very end under a red rose at the feet of Our Lady on the ledge above his bed. There were three beds in his alcove, all occupied, and about two-thirds of the other beds were occupied by patients who looked as if they were very comfortable indeed.

My friend and his colleagues, breaking away from watching TV in the corner, were unanimous that I should declare myself afflicted by some ailment immediately and get out of the foul weather for a few days in their ward. The food, they said, was great and the time was flying by.

It seemed to me that none of them were too ill. My friend said he had enjoyed his first full night of sleep the previous night and was rapidly recovering. They had tested all the parts of him from every angle, he said, including parts he did not know he owned at all.

Himself and myself descended through the house in a lift and went to the smoking zone at the back. There was a wooden octagonal gazebo around a circular marble table which, on closer examination, featured a barbecue center circle which doubled as an ash tray.

When we returned the talk among the four of us was about Biddy Early, the East Clare healer/witch (God rest her!) and about her many cures.

The oldest of us had a funny story about Biddy once having two pills to cure both two pigs and their owner. I’m afraid I cannot repeat the yarn because it boasted a suppositorial punchline. But it was good.

The nurse gave me the firm eyebrow to depart wlong before I was ready. By then the craic was getting really good, my friend had identified two men out in the ward that he knew and would be chatting with. Probably about either cattle or cars or hurling.

I took my leave and, descending the stairs, met a male attendant who was about as learned a man as ever I met on the matter of Gaelic football.

Small is beautiful too, I thought going home through the rain. The ultra-modern big regional hospitals are necessary surely, but there is still a place for local hospitals like Ennis General, warm, friendly, effective across the general scale of medicine, and an entire dimension closer to home. That’s a healing thing in itself.

The wind battered the car through Clarecastle, the rain was lashing down in torrents. I nearly turned back and admitted myself for the rest of the night.

I’d have liked more stories about football, Biddy, and the jobber coming back from the Limerick Fair, and what happened to Dr. Bill Loughnane that night.

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