Can You Walk on Flat Ground?

15th February 2012 Wednesday

8.30 am We are sitting on hard chairs in the waiting room. My husband is wearing a hospital gown and his shoes. There are children’s books on the table. My husband is reading The Tale of Peter Rabbit. I’m reading Jack and the Beanstalk. He has been called back for a pelvic Xray. They discovered some cancer in the polyp they took out a month ago. The consultant says he’s lucky in wasn’t in the bowel wall. This is just to check it isn’t anywhere else.

When he comes back from the Xray he has a canula in his arm which I can’t bear to look at. I hate needles. He had a reaction to the contrast they injected beforehand and felt very sick. The doctor says it happens to about one in a hundred people. We can’t go home till they are sure it isn’t an allergic reaction. A nurse brings him a cup of tea and two digestive biscuits.

At home there's a letter in the post from the hospital saying he has been referred by the optician for further tests. He says, ‘what’s the optician?’

3.30 pm Another waiting room. This time a medical assessment by the Department of Work and Pensions. They want to know how his condition affects his every day life and if it warrants his benefits. The doctor who interviews us asks endless questions from a standard form like,

‘Can you walk on flat ground?’

‘Do you ever go shopping by yourself?

‘Have you got hearing aids?’ To which I my husband replies ‘Not at the moment.’

I want to scream with boredom and frustration. Why doesn’t he ask,

‘How does it affect your everyday life if when you read you stumble over every noun in a sentence, if you don’t recognise the person who leaves you a message on your answer-phone, if you look at an aubergine but you don’t know if it’s an aubergine or an artichoke or an asparagus?'

What it does is to make you feel small and frightened and angry. And dependent. But the department of works and pensions hasn’t got a category for that.