Sleepover

There has been a bed shortage in Maidstone General Hospital, and Major's treatment, which we'd been expecting to start three weeks ago, has been put back by a further week. What can have happened? A sudden epidemic of cancers needing more urgent treatment than his? An outbreak of plague? All the staff on holiday at once? None of the above: financial cuts in all departments mean that the ward upstairs has been closed and the cancer-specialising Charles Dickens Ward is now also taking A&E cases.

After endless staff-meetings Major is told to check in on Sunday evening to be ready for treatment on Monday morning. He asks fabulous, busy Nurse Charlotte if he can turn up early in the morning when the pharmacy opens rather than waste tax payers' money spending Sunday night in this noisy, hot twilight-zone full of scary-looking sick people for nothing. She says that if he isn't there in the evening, by Monday morning his bed will have been taken by someone else. To my surprise, feisty, garrulous Major is silenced by this.

I deliver him to the main entrance of Maidstone Hospital and at his insistence turn round to head straight home again without getting out of the car. In his shorts he's all knees and specs, overnight bag under his arm; he wears the mystified expression of a 4 year old being abandoned by his mother on the first day of school. Along the exit drive a young man sits on a bench in the evening sun, hooked up to his chemo-drip on wheels, talking into his mobile, smoking a fag.

I call Major when I get home and catch him in the loo, sobbing. He and his ward-fellows have been exchanging cancer stories, and Major, the new boy, is shaken by the experiences of those further down the treatment line. He's also annoyed that obnoxious Bob knew to get there half an hour earlier than everyone else to bag the bed by the window for heatwave relief.

At lunch time the next day I take him soup, sandwiches and strawberries. He's plugged into his whirring, bleeping chemo-drip trolly but the clear liquid pumping into his arm is only water; kidney-flushing in readiness for the poison which will cure him. Litres of water go in and are pissed out into a measuring jug; he's supposed to record the amounts but the figures are too faded and small for him to read so he makes them up. Stooping slightly, like someone older and sicker than the person I left 18 hours before, he trundles the trolly into the day room but there's no privacy there and it's beautiful outside... Sitting at a wooden bench in the shade, Major tucks into the picnic I've brought with relish (deeply gratifying considering my duff domestic-goddess skills, though it must be said that the poor guy is hungry...) when the drip-trolly's battery starts screeching, insisting we find a power point to plug it into. We trundle back to the day room and whisper.

Relationships have been forged overnight and Major exchanges nods and words with patients and staff, including Nurse Ratched who is distributing lunch like a surly air-hostess. (Why would a specialist chemotherapy nurse be distributing lunch?) Her shift is 12 hours long and she's obviously stretched to the end of her tether and is brusque to the point of rudeness with the patients, "I can't do everything at once, you know...". They are sweet and understanding but I want to slap her for speaking so harshly to people who are feeling ill and vulnerable: it feels as if she will snap and run screaming from the building at any minute anyway so I'd just be helping her release... Major tells me she's an excellent nurse who worked singlehandedly and without a break throughout the night.

Any minute a tall, silent native American's going to come into the ward with a water fountain.