Not Today

Thursday 13th January

Day 267

Another hospital - Sidmouth Cottage Hospital - like a big house or a church with corridors. My father and sister and I sit in a row in wing backed arm chairs in the waiting room and wait - for two hours for the surgeon from Columbia to cut into my father’s ear and take a biopsy. My father calls it an autopsy to make the nurse laugh. Which she does. There is a low table full of Hello and OK and Women’s Weekly magazines, glossy with gossip, which we flick through when the conversation falters. The other chairs are occupied with people also waiting for the man from Columbia.

Afterwards, when the waiting room is empty, the nurse brings my father a cup of tea and a packet of ginger biscuits and I dab at his numb ear which is oozing blood, with a piece of gauze. All the time I keep my phone on - expecting a call from another hospital. But it’s not today - the day my cousin dies.