IT is difficult for healthy people to imagine that hospital could
actually be enjoyable, but there are several conditions in which it was
once tolerable. Pregnant
ladies with high blood pressure were a notable example. Apart from
worries about how their families were coping,
being ''observed'' was the only genuine rest that some of them ever
had. Young men with healing fractures were usually well enough to flirt
with their nurses, and a remarkable number married them. In the days of
isolation hospitals, the only thing wrong with most convalescent
patients was that they were still contagious.
These days, unfortunately, hospitals have become such dangerous places
that the sick have to be returned as soon as possible to the safety of
their own homes, where at least they are immune to their own germs. When
modern patients find themselves kept in hospital more than a few days,
the uneasy conviction grows that they must be really ill. The exception,
of course, is the malingerer, or
sufferer from Munchausen's Syndrome. These enjoy life in hospital so
much that mysterious new symptoms regularly
occur just before Christmas, when they will not only enjoy warmth,
companionship, and good food, but the inner comfort of knowing that
nothing is really wrong.
Alas, in these stringent times the modest pleasures of even
malingerers are under threat. At the Royal Gwent Hospital in South
Wales, a charge is to be made for bedside television sets. Those who are
unable to shuffle along in their dressing gowns to the communal lounge
will in
future be charged #3 a day -- an impost which the management say will
be used to fund other ward improvements, such as telephones. It is a
cunning system, for it will undoubtedly help doctors to sort out the
impostors. Anyone who has been genuinely ill in hospital knows that he
or she would willingly pay #3 a day to have the television switched off.
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