Hospital Corridors

Some people like airports and railway stations and shopping malls and art galleries.

Some people don’t like hospitals.

I do. I love them. All of them. Old ones, new ones, empty ones, full ones.

I see curing, healing, surviving. I see endless helping. When I visit a hospital I see people engaged in the pursuit of other people’s happiness. A selflessness. I know there is pain and death and lingering (inattentive staff and plain human error) but somehow the flip side still pushes through to me. It is what I feel.

In the corridor of Charlie’s art is secured to the wall. No one ponders it. It does its best to draw attention to itself. Large canvases. Orange vinyl chairs sit empty. The spaces are large and often vacant, like everyone is suddenly well. Once, new, the corridors were carpeted with a dark heavy-duty material but eventually that folly was replaced with linoleum roadways and I imagine orderlies pushing beds, two abreast, being able to race. Wide corridors. Being able to make donuts with hospital beds.

The hospital has old parts pretending to be closed. But then someone is seen in an office behind venetians. In the back-end there are old entrances, closed. Salmon brick and baby blue facade. Beside them sits an assortment of chairs, broken or bent and left out to rust or be stolen. No one does, because no one wants a disused hospital chair.

Do I love them because they are always ramped? Made for me. Even the old ones. Masonite ramps, too steep. Covered walkways that still let the weather in.

Once I visited a friend in Royal Perth and on leaving ran into a doctor I knew. He took me through emergency and out onto the roof top where the doctors hung out on their breaks. A few old chairs looked out over the railway line and the roof tops of old buildings. The sun shone there, and in secret, warmed their faces. In white coats they brought their coffee and took in the air. Some probably had a smoke. I felt lucky to have been up there with them. Like kids sneaking behind the bike shed at school.

At Fiona the staff don’t have their own canteen. So instead they eat with the public at the cafes strewn throughout the central courtyard. In their baggy green scrubs and forgotten paper shower caps. It makes life-saving seem so very ordinary, buying cappuccino, between laparotomies.

When I was little my mother took me to nursing homes and hospitals on the weekends visiting various decrepit members of the extended family. It captivated me. I liked to peer into spaces that seemed hidden. I liked the way strange and repugnant smells stung the inside of your nose. Methylated spirits. Why does all hospital food only smell of boiled broccoli? I wanted to know what happened behind the pulled curtain. My mother always went to the flower room to fill a vase and arrange the flowers she brought from her garden. She always knew where to go and get stuff and how to speak to nurses to get things done. Even then I knew this was a skill.