We sit in solid silence, bored to a barely-audible backdrop of re-circulated air and distant traffic.
One man reads Metro, another leans back and sends a text message. I’m amazed he can get reception here. More, I find myself wondering what’s wrong with them. We all look ill in the yellow-green light.
Someone wheels his bike past as if it was the most natural thing in the world to have it here, indoors, where people are waiting for the tube. In this setting, removed from the road, it seems oddly out of place. This is exactly how I feel. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, either.
We wait for our turn on the tube.
The clock ticks around, and there’s a constant clunk-swish as distant doors open and close, accompanied by the persistant squeak of rubber soles and wheels on scratched lino floors.
One man, young and bearded and uncomfortable in his seat, crosses and uncrosses his legs, before being pointed towards a doorway. He disappears through it before coming out again dressed in trainers, socks and a blue gown, short and gaping at the back. He grasps a carrier bag on his lap and looks as uncomfortable with his attire as I am at the prospect of doing the same. No-one said anything about public near-nudity. I’d have worn good pants if I’d known.
Did your mum ever say that to you? About always needing to wear good pants in case you got knocked over? Just mine, then?
A friend’s mum worked in the radiology department of the local hospital in central Scotland, and used to regale us over dinner with stories of procedures and patients, including one hapless individual who was dispatched on arrival to the changing cubicle with instructions to change into one of those short paper robes with the slit up the back and a couple of paper ties at the nape and waist.
“There’s a pile of them on the bench in the cubicle,” my friend’s mum said, “just pop out when you’re done and hop up on the table, ok?”
Ten minutes of muffled rustling later the sheepish man emerged from the cubicle with a beetroot face, with the gown gaping open at the front, clutching the hem of the robe tightly down by his genitals. He sidles over to the desk, blushing furiously and crouching slightly, and whispers to the radiologist in a broad Scots accent:
“Ah’m ever so sorry, hen… I couldnae find wan of they robes with the slit up the back - I tried ‘em awl an, and they awl dud up doon the front, like this yin!”
They don’t make we wear a robe, though they do make me take off my earrings, belt, engagement ring and watch. They put me on a paper-sheet covered bed with my head dangling off the end, so my hair hangs down nearly to the floor and all the blood rushes to my face. They strap my forehead in so I can’t move and then pass me into the tube, through the donut a few times. The whirring and spinning of the laser mechanism within the donut gives the impression of being inside a washing machine.
With my neck craned back, I can count the screws in the shelves on the far side of the room. My head throbs, impatiently. There are thirty six.
We change position, this time with hard blocks beside my temples to keep me staring upwards, and again, the bed moves through the spinning donut. I think of Contact and putting a wash on when I get home.
When we change positions again, I make a feeble joke to the radiologist about discovering that the swelling in my head is actually my brain, but as I’m lying on the table passing through the tube, inch by inch, it strikes me that it would be ironic if it was an enthusiasm gland, or an inflamation of the blogging cortex, or something totally 21st century and random. It probably isn’t.
It’s something curious and probably quite dull and routine to do with my sinuses - uncomfortable and irritating, but not serious, unless you count having constant post-nasal drip and stuffiness as serious - which neither the NHS nor I do. Annoying, yes. Life-threatening? Absolutely not.
I pull my ring back onto my finger and ask the radiologist if I can see the pictures she has taken; the layer-by-layer cross section of the back of my face. I’m curious to see the inside of my head, rather than just feeling it, but she makes non-committal noises about needing to wait until the doctor has taken a look.
I don’t know how to interpret this response, so I leave.
People seem to look at me oddly as I walk down the mazelike corridors. Are they wondering what’s wrong with me, too?
I’m nearly out of the hospital, when I catch my reflection in a door. I have a faint red mark across my forehead, where the strap held me down. If only every ailment were that visible, that easy to rub away.
