Low life | 11 June 2011

I was sitting alone in a day room on the top floor of an NHS hospital. Presently, two women came in and sat down. One sat with her face in her hands, sobbing silently, while the other leant forward and whispered to her. Far from being consoled, the crying woman broke down still further and her sobs became faintly audible. What level of personal modesty was this, I wondered, that was reluctant to disturb the silence of a hospital day room, even in the midst of such grief?

Then the quiet of the day room was roughly broken by a man shouting my surname at me. He then led me at a fast walking pace along a corridor and into a small side-office, where he briskly introduced himself with a brief, impersonal, almost contemptuous handshake. This was the consultant.

There was another, younger man in the room. The second man I took to be a pupil or student. His handshake was warm and welcoming — fraternal even. The consultant, who clearly wielded his power with little or no grace, ordered me into a chair. He and his pupil sat also. ‘So why have you come to see me?’ said the consultant testily.

I had been referred to the hospital for a brain scan, query epilepsy, I said.

‘Why?’ he said.

I explained that I’d blacked out for several hours and woken up in a hotel room with no understanding of how I had got there. And when I had returned to the last pub I remembered being at, hoping to retrieve my car keys, the barmaid told me that I had been thrown out for annoying the other customers by lying on the floor and ‘pretending’ to have an epileptic fit.

He had some notes in front of him made by my GP, and he began hurriedly scribbling others on to a new page.