by Carla Chiat
There’s always this annoying rave song playing
on the hospital’s ground floor, Hospital Street.
Whenever I dawdle to the cafeteria,
dawdling beside wheeled drips and men on crutches,
women with skin stained from recurrent radiation,
and mothers carrying crying babies and lists and lists
of medications for dispensing from the pharmacy,
the song is playing.
Whenever I’m traveling from the consulting room via
the egg-yolk coloured, animal-patterned pediatric clinic,
past cups and bibs and teats and busy-body doctors
oblivious to the sound of music,
the song is playing.
Whenever I creep out from the office,
cutting through the river of patients pouring down Hospital Street,
the song is playing over and above the noise created when the trans-sender –
a medium-sized club car built to haul the frail and
exploited by lazy members of staff and medical students, –
drives by, hooting.
A woman in a neon aliceband grips a canister of air
that is connected to the tubes in her nose,
poised on the peddle of her wheelchair,
resting against her legs.
A kitchen staff member pushes past a load of cow carcasses,
cut for preparation, uncontained and spilling.
A boy in a bear suit shares a smoke with Superman
and the clouds close over Hospital Street.
It was Medicine Week last week
on Hospital Street.
To promote drug literacy.
Ken jou medisyne: know your medicine.
Ask your doctor for expert advice –
your doctor will tell you everything.
Knowledge is powerful medicine
and your health is cherished!
Please, dear patient, adhere to the treatment plan
designed especially for you by your doctor.
Do not, under any circumstances,
tamper with the specific dose or mixture of medicines
without conferring with your trusted ally: your doctor!
Your doctor knows best.
But, it is important for you to:
a.) Own your illness.
Acknowledge that you are sick.
Confront the fact that your illness is the central interruption
around which your life revolves.
Adjust to lifelong and persistent limitation.
And b.) Disown your illness.
You are not your illness; your illness is not you.
People are losing and sighing and calling out on Hospital Street.
Stumbling upon their long-lost selves and feeling hard done by.
Falling, and then holding on.