K-85: A STORY ABOUT AN ANT'S BROKEN JOURNEY

(Extract)

K-85: A STORY ABOUT AN ANT`S BROKEN JOURNEY                           

(Extract)

 

Typology of Patients I

            As I looked around, I realized that in each hospital there are about five types of patients (though one could look at this from different points of view, I will use only one type of classification).

            There are patients that give in completely to their disease and have no idea what to do about it. They place themselves in the hands of the doctors and nurses and accept that they are sick. They don't do a thing and just stay in bed.

            Then there are patients who consider their presence in the hospital to be a mistake. Such a patient, for example, was the patient lying next to me – thirty-one year old Appendix. He could not wait to get back to work.

            The third type of patient is a veteran. They orientate themselves in a hospital like the old hands in the military. They insert and pull out the infusion, measure their blood pressure, and are knowledgeable about the individual values of biochemical blood tests of all kinds. If you woke them up in the middle of the night, they would tell you without hesitation the numerical code of their diagnosis. Besides the main one, they of course also know the codes of the secondary ones and are able to analyse in detail all that happens in their body. These patients – if prescribed a strict diet – feed secretly on wieners and salami in the hospital snack bar; they know what they can get away with.

 

Veteran I

            A few days after they released Appendix from the hospital, the door in the  ward flew open and a tall, thin man with black hair, holding an infusion stand in his hand, barged in.

            My new neighbour introduced himself with his diagnosis: “I have a K-85 Pancreatitis chronica acuta exacerbans. How about you?”

            I told him that I had the same, but I also betrayed my secondary diagnoses: “I also have hepatitis B, chronic gastritis, and was treated for arterial hypertension. And during my military service I suffered from neuro-vegetative dystonia which, like hypertension, is a common disease of civilisation.”

            The Veteran nodded with understanding, but the third bed mate (bed mate Gall Bladder), who clearly belonged in the first type of my classification, regarded us with horror; he probably considered us patients more suited to a mental institution. Then I realized that, unwittingly, I had re-classified myself from the fourth type – more about that later – to the Veterans.

 

Typology of Patients II

            There exists another, fourth type: these are patients who are totally unable to realize the seriousness of their disease and the general state of their health in particular and see the hospital as a place suitable for lazing about, or an occasion for catching up on

what their daily routine prevented them from doing. For example, for getting enough sleep and reading books. They show a lively interest in everything going on around them, they observe their fellow patients, doctors and nurses, receive their visitors with considerable enthusiasm, since they are the centre of their attention. They are capable of discussing the diseases from which they suffer and that others suffer from and can talk about how an old man who could still walk soiled his pants and some one else pissed on the toothbrushes. They get an intense pleasure from sonographic examination, following the computer monitor while trying to find out what is going on there, and keep bothering the doctor with their questions; when a blood sample is taken they don't faint, but are curious to see if the nurse finds their vein on the first try, and ask for a sleeping pill just to discover how one sleeps with a pill. They are really astonished when they find they are still up at three in the morning, so they get out of bed and have a smoke, while laughing like madmen, realizing that the pill had an opposite effect. They are high on it, they see visions and have a compulsion to laugh at everything, including the toilet door, or boxes of infusion stacked on each other; in the morning they give a colourful description of their experience to the nurse as she takes their blood sample and tells them how only a very small minority of people react in such an invigorating way to a sleeping pill...

            And so on...

 

Veteran II

            And then, the day when Pancreatitis chronica acuta showed up, I unwittingly almost found myself in the third group, among the veteran patients, and would have looked and behaved like one if the veteran Pancreatitis hadn’t brought me down to earth right at the start.

            He came with his infusion stand in one hand and an unlit cigarette in his mouth. He unplugged himself from the infusion and went out to have a smoke. He lit up right in the hallway and the smoke drifted through the Surgical Ward.

            I realized how far behind I was compared to the new pancreatic colleague. I was like a private from the military unit in the suburb of Vajnory while he was a veteran from Desert Storm and Afghanistan combined.

            Pancreatitis acuta was simply a pro: during the previous six months he had already been in the hospital five times and now, while in the recovery room, they gave him a suction tube. I was in the hospital for only the first time and they did not give me a suction tube, for which I gave thanks to God and the nurses.

            Over the thirty years of his life to date , Pancreatitis had been operated on twice; instead of bone his leg was fitted with a six-inch long steel screw, and he had also spent some time in a stomatological clinic where they wired his mouth shut and he could only eat through a tube. He went through one stint in an infection ward and one in a neurological ward and – he claimed – had passed through all the wards except gynaecology and obstetrics. So he clearly belonged in the third group, among the seasoned veterans, while I was still wet behind the ears, I was a greenhorn, something between type three and four, as someone without any operations, without a steel screw in my leg, or a mouth wired shut. True, I had no wish for any of the above, but I realized – and that bothered me – that I lacked the expertise and medical connections that Pancreatitis acuta possessed.

            For example, I did not know the names of all the nurses and doctors, was not on a friendly basis with patients who also suffered from Pancreatitis and problems connected with the stomach and gall bladder and, which irked me, I was not in a position to disconnect my infusion at will, the way he was. I did not dare, I lacked the courage. I preferred to ring for the nurse and ask for it nicely.

            Pancreatitis acuta, if he felt like it, could pretend that he was feeling sick from the infusion, that his vision was blurry and his head was swimming. He would disconnect and tell the nurse that the infusion had made him sick.

            While Pancreatitis knew all the nooks and crannies of the old hospital, I did not even know where the snack bar was and when they finally brought some food for us, I could not remember the number of our diet. So I told myself instead that I would try to stay for some time in my (fourth) category, where I felt comfortable, after all, and would not try to pretend I was a veteran, even though I had spent who knows how many days in the hospital already.

 

Typology of Patients III

            I would like to mention in passing another category of patients that practically infest our medical institutions. These are the professional patients, mostly totally healthy individuals suffering from the incurable disease of hypochondria. They know how to describe the symptoms of their illness so persuasively that they have managed to bamboozle even the best read and most sophisticated general medical practitioner who, finally, after being bothered by them for weeks, recommended hospitalisation. Such a patient gets the greatest pleasure when they take his blood test, or insert a tube into his stomach (gastroscopy), or stick a finger up his anus, and is greatly disappointed when even the most detailed examination fails to confirm in his body the presence of some terrible disease.

            Irrespective of whatever disease such patients suffer from and what classification category they belong to, they can be divided into two big groups: active patients with various hobbies and interests and passive patients without any interests. There is no point in talking about the passive ones: they just lie in bed. They live with their disease like a wondering dog with his fleas, waiting only for the arrival of the doctor who would destroy their fleas. Here belong the sick people described above as patients of the first group, but there could be an occasional case classified in the second group, as there are cases of apathetic veterans and, of course, patients of the fifth group, certain of dying slowly from a horrifying, hidden, and unfathomable disease.

            In the hospital, the active patients (most often from the third and fourth group, but also fifty percent of the second one) listen eagerly to the radio, get a portable TV, pat the nurses on their behind or touch them up improperly when they take a blood sample. Or else, they walk endlessly along the halls like the old man who soiled his pants so badly, or read.

 

                                                                                                Translated by Peter Petro