Overheard in a hospital ward

I love the NHS. I really do and I would never complain about the fantastic job that all the staff continuously perform daily. I think it’s a wonderful service that everybody in the UK should be extremely proud of. This appreciation for such a beautiful British asset has made me discover that I find hospitals rather leveling places.

I’m grounded in the sense that you see doctors and high level nurses working alongside cleaners in harmony. The institution brings the notion of death to the surface, yet the atmosphere remains surprisingly upbeat in among a sea of very ill people. Hospitals make you think a lot and the other day I honed in on the variety conversations that you hear on a ward.

No visitor to a hospital ward wants to be there. No matter how great I think the NHS are, hospitals aren’t the friendliest or most welcome of places so any time spent in one is usually not out of choice. People are either visiting someone who’s incredibly sick making the whole event very sad, or their relative or friend has been waiting upon an operation or discharge for ages so the entire visit becomes a little tedious.

I’ve spent quite a lot of my free time in a hospital ward recently and it came to my attention how varied the conversations are. I livened my visits up by listening in on these and realising how interesting it can be when you take a load of people from all areas within society and place them on the same cardio ward. Catagorising them for their condition rather than wealth, interests or political views.

It becomes very obvious early on when you realise how forced some of the conversations can be. You have a select amount of time allocated to visiting in most circumstances and a lot of people will be coming most days so the conversation starters can become scarce. Also, people are trying hard to fill the amount of the time with conversation, no silences. Yes, you rarely see visitors and patients sitting in silence and just enjoying one anthers company as you’d find in normal social scenarios.

Unlike if you’d invited them round for a cuppa for example, where there would be peaceful silences, may a bit of watching TV or listening to the radio and a natural flow of conversation. Not in hospital, the art of conversation becomes clinical like the surroundings you are in. A lot of um’s and ah’s between visitors and patients when figuring where to take the chat next. Perhaps pretending not to be extremely worried about the medical verdict or seeming as though the hospital is the only place that the visitor needs to be that day. That they don’t have millions of tasks on their mind that need to be completed before the day is out. It’s totally unnatural.

The other thing I noticed was the variety of conversations which instantly made me realise how different the people on the ward are. You’ve got one man discussing America and gun crime, whether Trump is OK and world politics. Another man expressing his appreciation of the NHS and all their staff. Another crying because he’s obviously been told some devastating news, whether it’s to do with his health or not. While the man on bed 2 is raving about his grand national winnings and bed 4 declaring his love for cottage pie.

Aside from making the staff’s shifts a little more exciting, overhearing this diversity of discussion within such a small space made me think about quite a large concept. That no matter where we come from, we’ll all leave this world in exactly the same way. Sometimes forgetting our status and place in society, putting religious and political values to one side along with other things that define us and simply being human, can remind us that there’s not a lot of difference between us.