Every occasionally I try to write down a description of the pain, whether it’s a birth, a tooth, or a head, and it becomes a frustrating game in which no one ever wins. Doctors try to quantify our pain by asking us to rate it on a scale of one to ten, or by pointing to different sad faces – the McGill Pain Questionnaire consists of 78 possible words to tick, including ‘pulling,’ terrifying’. ‘ and ‘boring’, words that playfully poke around in a feeling, but rarely fully land. I often wonder if there are certain states, like pain, that are beyond description – every now and then you think you have it and then the image turns and goes around and it’s lost – but then I read something like Garth Greenwell’s new novel Small rainwhich begins with our narrator standing hunched over with a writhing pain in his abdomen. Greenwell not only discovers a new language for his narrator’s pain, which mutates into degrees of crisis, but also a language for the squeaky, cold intimacy of a hospital stay, and the terrible wires and people that reach out.
We all find ourselves here, or will all find ourselves one day, in a raised bed in a buzzing ward, under the care of polished strangers. I have vivid memories of a hospital room with a clock whose minute hand did not tick – instead it slid between the numbers with no apparent rhythm, very sinister, very disturbing, especially at night when the lights were left on and you could see it creeping forward to dawn. In these places you do everything you can to remain human by clinging to comfortable things, such as shame or status, for as long as possible, until perhaps a smooth nurse washes your hands for you, or a handsome doctor puts his pen in your hand. blood clot that you present in the clean metal dish.
God, it’s beautiful what Greenwell does in this book, his narrator keeping an eye on him being watched, his mind and memory slipping in and out of the clean little room with its rotating medical staff, slipping away to his beloved , his father, his poetry. , a storm. It captures the boredom, humiliation, and fear of living in a body in a hospital with such precision and grace that I found myself dreaming back in those rooms most nights I read it.
Like when I was awake for almost a week after I first gave birth, in a ward above Whitechapel during a scorching summer. The woman in the bed opposite her wanted surgery for her constipation, the one next to her was crying. I desperately wanted to get home and also wanted to sleep, but neither was within reach. One evening my boyfriend hid under the bed when the nurse came by – no visitors were allowed after 8 p.m., but I was afraid to be alone with the baby as I was racked with pain and went crazy with exhaustion. We felt like we had come away with something big, maybe even bigger than the silly trick of trying to have a baby in the first place, as he rocked her in the chair and I finally fell asleep, while my neighbor was on the other side of the ward farted deep into the night. My friend was kicked out around 3am, but we were grateful for that sliver of time that cut through the baffling hospital reality and somewhat saved me.
Most of the time I have been a hospital visitor rather than a patient, and it speaks, I think, to my good fortune that even in the most terrible situations I have usually found something to enjoy. Of course I wasn’t the one with the PICC line, I wasn’t the one munching on a dry tuna sandwich in bed, but it felt like a great opportunity to me, a privilege. Sometimes because hospitals create a timeout, where the sliding minute hands of their clocks allow us to chat in meandering ways like we used to on the couch, without kids or work responsibilities snapping at us – we have permission to to talk, at least until visiting hours end. Sometimes because, when you want to do something but nothing needs to be done, it gives relief and pleasure to just be there, next to a bed, useful occasionally at small tea gatherings and of course as a witness to it all.
At the end of Small rainour narrator, who has described the structure of two weeks of hospital life, subjected to the outrage of bed baths and sharp scratches of a hundred needles, as time slows down on his toes, is finally let go. I remember leaving the hospital and it felt like a prison escape, the hospital at a rare intersection of extreme tenderness and necessary, perhaps depersonalization, where deep care involves endless red tape, and your bed is prepared for another body while you’re still tying your shoes. shoes. His sister picks him up, they stop at his house where his partner waits anxiously; he appreciates for the first time the great mundanity of home life and his own small, imperfect love story. After two weeks of pain and hospitalization, inconspicuous acts of freedom allow him to catch his breath: his lover’s leg clamped between his knees at night, the water on his back in the shower, a dog running to a ball. He endured and survived and paid attention, and now he’s come home, and the price might have been worth it.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on X @EvaWijseman