141. A poem without words

Are you any good at drawing?  I’m not and that’s not some kind of faux modesty because I really cannot draw anything that looks at all like it’s supposed to. 

I am artistically illiterate.  It was the Roman lyric poet, Horace, who said that a picture is a poem without words. 

I can draw a house but it will just consist of rectangles representing the outline, the windows and the doors, with a triangle on top that is the roof. 

It is the kind of thing that a child might draw - but more of that later.

It has never been something that has bothered me until yesterday, when one of my daughters mocked me, or at least, I think that’s what she was doing.

That daughter really can draw and her ability is such that not only did she achieve a grade A at ‘A’ level art, but she was offered more than a thousand pounds - that she turned down - for one of the paintings that made up her end-of-course portfolio.

I don’t know where her talent came from; it certainly wasn’t from me and not only has she talent in art but she has a very pleasant singing voice too whereas to all intents and purposes, I am tone deaf.

Until recently, I haven’t had to draw anything.  I gave up art at the end of my third year at secondary school, aged 14.  Then, a few weeks ago, my grandson came to visit.

Joshua is 2 years old and as it does at that age, his vocabulary is expanding by the day. 

We all went out for Sunday lunch.  The service was a little slow and one of the waitresses gave Joshua a plain sheet of paper and a jar of wax crayons for him to play with while we all waited for the food to arrive.

After a couple of minutes, Josh had given up scribbling and pushed the jar of crayons and a clean sheet of paper to me.  “Cow,” he demanded.

“I can’t draw a cow,” I told him, hoping as I said it that one of the other adults would take up the baton from me and draw him a cow. 

“Don’t be such an old misery,” Caroline said.  “Draw him a cow.”

I did.

“Horsey,” insisted Joshua. 

I had to think how a horse is different from a cow and then I tried to do as I had been instructed.  Joshua had said nothing critical but I couldn’t be sure what he was thinking.  His face gave nothing away.

I converted the horse into a zebra when he wasn’t watching by adding some stripes to the horse.

I was quite pleased when he asked me to draw a sheep because I thought that my representation of a sheep would be so different from that of a cow, a horse or a zebra, that it might unmistakably be recognised as a sheep.  I think I just about managed it.

The banana, plate of dinner and the house that he asked me to draw were easy but I found that differentiating between a chicken and a duck was difficult.

Our first courses arrived and, in the process, I managed to end my ordeal and embarrassment by slipping the paper to Alice, Josh’s mum. 

Lucy, Joshua’s aunt and my younger daughter, rang me today.  She had been to visit Alice.

“Josh is quite good at drawing, isn’t he?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I told her.  “I’ve never seen anything he drew.”

“He’s got some drawings on the fridge,” she told me.  “I’ll send you an email with a photo.”

Bloody cheek!

140. Sepsis

I tried to get out of bed on Wednesday morning, January 24^th but I couldn’t stay upright.  Caroline called the doctor and he arrived four hours later.

He hardly said a word.  The first thing he did was take my blood pressure and temperature, whereupon he took out his mobile phone and called for an ambulance.

My blood pressure was 72/44 and my temperature was 39.8°C.  He told me that he thought I had sepsis and that he had never seen a blood pressure so low and he was amazed that I was conscious.  I was taken to the hospital with the blue lights and siren going. 

In hospital, I was diagnosed with sepsis caused by a kidney infection.  For six days I had a cannula in each arm and through them, I received three units of blood and a cocktail of antibiotics.   

That was my second hospital stay in England; the second time that I’ve been in a ward with random patients.  Ten years ago, I was in hospital for 105 days in Miami but apart from the last night, when I had Johnny Mathis for a roommate (click to see), I had a room to myself.

If you read the account of my previous stay in Milton Keynes University Hospital in May 2013 (click to see), you may remember that sleep was impossible because of the anti-social behaviour of one patient.  The same thing happened again. 

In my bay with five patients, of whom I was possibly the youngest, there were two men who caused constant chaos at night.  One of them, who kept losing the button used to call a nurse, just shouted, “Nurse….Nurse….Nurse….” all night at the top of his voice and then slept peacefully all day. 

The other man was quiet but he wandered about the room all night and I would find him standing motionless next to my bed several times throughout the darkness.  That was somewhat disturbing.

Is this coincidence?  Are 20 - 40% of men aged over 70 asocial, or do hostile men have a disproportionate tendency to be in hospital?  I have no idea but my admiration for the nurses who have to care for them is unbounded.

I was discharged on Thursday, February 1^st.  I feel better now than I have for a long time and I realise that I have probably been ill for months without realising it.

I hadn’t understood how ill I had been until I watched the regional news on the evening I returned home.  The lead story was about a woman who had to have three limbs amputated as a result of gangrene brought on by sepsis.

I was asked to go back for a check-up at the hospital on Thursday, February 8^th, my birthday. 

“Date of birth?” asked the receptionist at Out Patients.

“Today,” I said.

She looked up at me and she was clearly irritated.

“Yes, please.  Look, we’re in a hurry.  I’ve got 91 patients to register this afternoon.”