Among the many patients I recently visited with my colleague Lucy, was a gentleman in a bed at the far end of a Ward at UCLH. This is a bay of four beds, 1 to 4. This chap was in bed no. 1, half sitting up with his knees bent and foot trailing outside the end of the bed. He looked dishevelled. I hadn’t realised it, but this guy was a very tall man; Lucy had noticed it, as she saw that the bed had been extended at the foot, where I later knocked my shin bone on. She asked him how tall he was, and he said 6'10 and a half inch. And that his wife was only 5'2" - this reminds me of a Victor Borges joke about Mozart being only so high – indicating with two parallel arms, the height of Mozart’s stone bust. Victor then said that by all accounts Mozart was happily married. There was a customary long pause and then he said, “unfortunately Mrs Mozart was not, indicating that “she went all the way to the ground”.
We stayed with this guy for 30 minutes, he was really grateful for the opportunity to talk to someone. A lover of classical music he told us was a volunteer steward at the Royal Albert Hall. His wife, a nurse, had died, and he spoke at length of how he had met her and that they had 30 cats, most of them strays. One called Picasso, also nick-named Stinky Poo. He told us that there were two cats that would climb or jump onto the piano keyboard. One cat would step along the piano keyboard 'adagio' style and most delicately, whilst the other cat would clump clump along with an unusual degree of dissonance. We talked about music, and he said at one point in his life he thought about taking up the violin again, which he had played as a child and teenager, but his wife had said "No, no, the cats won’t stand it". Lucy and I smiled.
Another guy we met sat in an armchair which he had repositioned to enable him to see the comings and goings of doctors and nurses along the corridor, since his own bed was in an annexe to the bay, and he had no direct sight of his fellow patients. (Many nurses push trolleys on which a laptop is placed showing charts and graphs and all kinds of medicinal algorithms.) Lucy introduced herself to this patient and asked him “Are you hungry?” He answered, “No, I’m British”, which made us both laugh out loud. We humoured him a little and then he began to make these very comical faces. The first face, I had never seen before. He managed to make his upper lip ripple along both left and right as if an electrical current has been switched on. There was a definite tremor or quiver right along his upper lip. Left and right, and right to left. The technique must have involved the use of his tongue, and possibly him triggering a wonky nerve! It was very alarming but funny to see. I remarked I was glad he wasn’t out the night before which was Halloween! He laughed. And then he proceeded to produce a series of facial contortions, like the facial expressions the comedian Les Dawson would do when you kind of crumple your whole face. I asked him if he had been on the stage, but he said no.
To be continued!
