Moving - Lock, Stock and Carol

Well, it finally arrived.
Monday February 14th 2011.
Moving Day at the Luttrell Memorial Hospital.
I was scheduled to run my usual Monday Morning clinic in my dear little out-of-the-way corner of the old place, where, because Matron never roams and there isn't a receptionist,  I can accept as many extra patients as walk through the Undertaker's Parking Bay to get to my door. I like being obliging.
By ten past nine my third patient was parking his ride-on-mower type transport in said Undertaker's Parking Bay and popping in to see me.  By twenty-past he had left my room. At twenty two minutes past he was back: "There's a bloomin' great Pickford's lorry blocking the exit. I can't get out."
How they missed the Mower was beyond me, but having done so with such skill, they had also missed the fact that nothing was going to get out of the Parking Bay and back onto the road unless they shifted their lorry.  But they'd scarpered to collect the first of about a thousand boxes packed ready for removal to the new hospital.

My patient mounted the Mower and drove determinedly into the hospital. He hit two doors and because one wheel had pancaked a dog-turd in the road, he left distressing little brown smelly patches at regular intervals long the first chunk of corridor. I expect you could work out the circumference of his wheel from the distance between the patches.
"Never mind," I reassured him as he clunked the fourth doorframe in less than 20 feet. "The place will be closing on Thursday, they won't mind about the chipped paint so much."
I guided him to the next exit: another Pickford's removal lorry was blocking that, too, swallowing up great chunks of nursing and medical kit into its interior.  We fled to the main entrance where yet another lorry was backed right up to the steps.
"Try Outpatients entrance" a colleague suggested having watched us circumnavigate the building.
She was right.  My chap swung wide to line up for the lobby between two final fire doors. But he still managed to get skewed between them.  "Oh for goodness' sake," he huffed and dismounted. He simply picked up the back of The Mower and set it in line for the last door.  He remounted. "That's better," he said.  He knocked one last chunk of varnish off the last door as he sailed away to freedom.

All morning the Pickford Lorries came in and out.  By 1pm the front downstairs of the hospital was a ghost ship.  The patients had gone, the front office had been stripped of all but Sally, nobly manning the remaining desk, telephone and fax machine until the bitter end.  And still the lorries came.  At the back of the building, Casualty was empty and a security man and his microwave had installed themselves in the minute Cas Reception.  "We'll have all the doors except this one locked and boarded up by the end of the week," he assured me. "There will just be a couple of security guys to guard the place until Management feel we're not needed any more."

Outpatients bravely soldiered on alone. Full clinics there, all staff just getting on with their jobs as though the world were not collapsing and vanishing around them.  You gotta admire their spirit.  But they'll be gone by Wednesday too, and on Thursday Sister Outpatients will have all her clinics running at the new hospital as though nothing had ever happened.

It's weird, walking through a place you've known for many years as a busy buzzing hub of patient care ... stopped dead, tipped out, silenced - just like that.  I'm glad I took my memory photos of it all just a week ago.  I wonder if the hospital knows it's about to close.  I wonder if it minds that it won't be a hospital any more. Lady Luttrell commandeered it back in 1918 to receive 'Our Boys' coming back wounded from the First World War, but I'm not sure from whom she commandeered it or from what previous occupation. They won't knock it down, but nobody knows what will become of it.

I wandered across to the Operating Theatre, up in 'The Gods' on the third floor.  The Theatre was donated by Mrs Nicholas Fleming in 1920 in memory of her husband, according to the ancient stone plaque by the entrance. The family shield bears the motto 'Bhear na rich gan'. (That's Gaelic for 'may the king live forever' by the way: pointless sentiment really since he clearly didn't cos we have a Queen now).

The empty Theatre felt very eerie. I turned on the main operating lights one last time.  That seventh bulb hasn't worked for years. Many patients have pointed it out as they lay there having their hernias or whatevers repaired under local anaesthesia.
  "Light's gone, me dears."
  "We'll manage just for today without it," the surgeon would cheerfully say.
  "Ee said that last time, Doctor, and that was nine years ago when ee did hernia on t'other side."
That particular surgeon is operating out in Zambia now, with somewhat fewer lights than even the remaining six here.  Bet he can do a hernia repair in the dark by now.

As to the others, I wonder if they'll be able to operate at the new hospital at all with its full complement of theatre bulbs.  Mightn't they find it a little bright? Perhaps we should knock one out to make them feel at home.

I cleared out my double locker in the Theatre Changing room and packed the contents away, well, OK, shovelled everything into a large plastic sack. I looked round one last time at the empty racks where white clogs and 'theatre scrubs' used to lie ready for our Lists.  As I started to close my locker, a small piece of paper caught my eye. I picked it up.

It was a photograph I'd taken some years ago.  It had been taken as a test-photo by one of the 'scopes' (long thin bendy things with cameras on the end to examine down gullets or in bladders or up bums).  We had to check they worked properly every time they were used but we got bored of just clicking at swabs or fingers. We've got a whole gallery of distorted nostrils and ear 'oles and eyeballs and an absolute cracker of .... no, not in polite company.
This photograph was of a cheerful smiling face, bit distorted by the nature of the camera but still very clearly showing a lovely and much-missed colleague, Carol James, who died a couple of years back. It seems very fitting that I should find her just as I was leaving.  I could almost hear her voice following me down the steep stairs: "Don't forget to close the theatre door and turn the light off when you go."

No, Carol, I won't forget.

I tucked her picture into my pocket, flicked off the light at the bottom of the stairs and clicked down the latch on the Yale lock as I left.  It felt very strange and I didn't look back.  It doesn't do, you know, to look back.

Next stop The New Hospital.