Paddy Murray Is (a bit) Unwell (this time) V

A FEW of the boys are working on a tunnel.
It’s slow work.
They’re using scalpels and hiding the dirt in their colostomy bags.
But progress is slow.
The plan is for them to emerge somewhere near the Guinness tap in a pub on James’s Street.
And I wish them the best of luck.
Personally, I’m not going to chance it, not because I don’t want to get out of here, believe me, I do.
It’s just that they’ve put me on the one antibiotic that reacts with alcohol. Makes you pretty ill. And when you’re pretty ill, the last thing you want is something that’s going to make you pretty ill. Or pretty iller. Or prettier ill. Whatever. You get my drift.

My defiance of authority came in the form of Singapore Noodles which were sneaked in by a friend on Saturday night, disguised as a bunch of grapes. The noodles, not the friend.
It was wonderful once again to taste something that tasted of something.
I am proposing, when I eventually finish my sentence, to launch a television game show called: Guess the Food.
In it, people will be blindfolded and fed hospital food and asked to guess what it is or, at least, what the hospital says it is.
“It’s beef,” they will cry only to be told it’s actually a pork chop.
“It’s a pork chop,” they will shout confidently, only to be told it’s bacon and cabbage.
“It’s bacon and cabbage,” they will roar to the cheers of their family members, who, like family members always do in such programmes, will be standing around looking like complete idiots.
But it won’t be bacon and cabbage, it will be jelly and ice cream.
I always thought there was at least a degree of overacting in films such as The Bridge Over the River Kwai and Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence.
But now I am beginning to see that incarceration does that to a body. It makes him overact dreadfully.
The boredom is the worst part of it. I don’t know. That could actually be a line from a prisoner of war movie for all I know.
And so I have taken to complaining.
I hate hotel rooms, but I don’t understand why single rooms in hospitals are half the size of single rooms in hotels. It’s the engineering I don’t understand. How do they make them so small? The architect must draw his plans under a microscope or something.
I don’t understand why they wake you up all the time either. Half the time they seem to wake you up to find out if you’re awake or not. And I bet they find that 100 per cent of the people they wake up in the middle of the night are actually awake. And that means they don’t feel guilty about waking you up.
And I hate the rubber covering on the mattress and the pillows. Yes, I know why it’s there. But I can say, honestly, in my case: Not guilty.
Most of all, I hate being without Connie and Charlotte and yes, Eric the mutt too.
Hospitals may repair the bodies of their patients, but they do nothing for their mental well being.
If Mary Harney had the faintest idea what she was doing, she would address the issue of patient welfare as well as patient well-being.
I’m off again.
Which is why one friend has promised to bring in to me, a painting for my wall.
The Moaner Lisa.

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Paddy Murray Is (a bit) Unwell (this time) IV

WHEN you’re in hospital, you’re asked a lot of questions.
You’re asked your date of birth on a regular basis.
(NOTE: If there is a Paddy Murray in James’s Hospital, and if he was also born on August 5, 1953, and if he is awaiting a barium enema or indeed, an enema of any description, could he please call a nurse and point out that he is not me.)
And you are asked about your allergies.
I am asked, for example, on an almost daily basis if i am allergic to penicillin or antibiotics of any kind.
I am not. But if I was and I told them so, they would not give me such medicine.
Every now and then, I am asked if I am allergic to anything.
I always reply in the affirmative and point out that I am seriously allergic to the following.
Sleep deprivation
Hospital food
Pain.

They don’t listen.
In fact, i wonder why they ask.
Because if there is one thing you are not permitted to do for any length of time in hospital, it’s sleep.
“Good night” and “good morning” are separated by only a tiny gap.
And if you are ever lucky enough to have a nurse tell you she, or indeed he, will leave you to sleep for an hour, be sure, be one hundred per cent sure, that during that hour, you will be visited by a cleaner, a junior doctor, a registrar, someone from accounts and the porter who is there to bring you, right now, for the x-ray which was scheduled for yesterday or tomorrow.
I have no doubt in my mind, that some patients die from sheer exhaustion.
Another certainty in hospital, is that you will be served hospital food. It is called hospital food not only because it is served in hospital, but because it is unique in manages to look so unappetising, in the way it can make carrots chewy.
And then there is pain.
Most hospital stays begin with pain.
You know the way it is. You have a pain in your elbow*. You go to the doctor. You have tests. You are told there is something wrong with your elbow (which you had more or less managed to figure out for yourself) and you have to go to hospital.
(*Insert hand, foot, heart, head, knee and so on, as appropriate.)
So off you go to hospital to get your pain removed.
And what do they do?
They start sticking needles into you. “It’s for bloods,” they say.
And if you have to get mucho drugs, they insert a canula or a Picc line. Worse still, they might decide to operate. And that involves cutting you and stitching you up again.
And it all hurts. It hurts a lot. And, if you’re a man, it hurts an awful lot indeed.
And so you lie awake in your bed, knowing that trying to sleep is pointless because someone will arrive ti wake you up if you make any attempt to get forty winks or even ten.
And you’re hungry because you can’t/won’t eat the food.
And you’re in pain.
You told them you’re allergic to all three.
Three?
Of course I meant four.
Stress. I’m alleregic to stress.
And boy, do they give it to you in spades in here.

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Paddy Murray Is (not that) Unwell (he hopes) VI

THIS is like the longest flight I’ve ever been on.
I’m not on a plane and I’m certainly not going anywhere.
I’m stuck in a hospital. And it reminds me of flying.
It’s the food.
If you accept that a chicken is a chicken and a potato is a potato and a pea is a pea, it is hard to credit the way the different ways those ingredients end up on your plate in, say, l’Ecrivan or Chapter One and in hospital or, indeed, on a flight or in boarding school.

We can only presume that, particularly in hospital, the ingredients are pretty decent. It seems unlikely that, despite the fact that our government has deemed the appointment of more committee chairmen to be of greater importance than financing the health service, hospital kitchens are supplied with dodgy ingredients.
And I accept, entirely, that cooking for 700 differs greatly from cooking for seven.
But it is nonetheless mind-boggling, how a piece of chicken can end up as part of a magnificent meal in l’Ecrivan, albeit at a price, and can, when served in hospital (or on a flight or in boarding school) make you enquire as to the location of the nearest McDonald’s restaurant.
(You will note that, today, I am not talking about wine or Guinness or pubs or anything of that sort. Mind you, I quite liked the suggestion of a hospital bar offering pre or post theatre drinks. Wonder if there’s an interval during which you could order them?)
My first encounter with food produced on an industrial scale was in an Irish College. My parents, though they loved me, handed me a nine-month sentence in the place from which I would have escaped had I been able to dig a tunnel.
The food was typically industrial.
You know. Take ordinary ingredients and cook them until they are bereft of flavour.
But was Fridays which were most memorable.
On that day, we were served what we were assured was a vegetable soup.
It consisted, I am sure, of the vegetables which had not been eaten during the week, boiled. In milk.
I kid you not.
These vegetables, carrots onions potatoes, peas and turnips, were boiled in milk until they were soft and mushy. And then they were served up to us unfortunate children.
We called it “Chef’s vomit.” I never found out if that was to do with taste or appearance or both.
Having served my sentence in that Irish c ollege in Ring, Co Waterford, I was later sentenced to nine months behind bars (not that type) in my last year in school in Blackrock College. (That sentence was, at least, deserved.)
They were way ahead of the game when it came to recycling.
Because on Mondays, we got a kind of beef chop which was, largely, inedible.
On Tuesdays, it was some type of beef stew, made, we believed, with the uneaten portions of the chops.
On Wednesdays, it was mince and mash, constructed, or deconstructed, from the uneaten stew.
On Thursdays, we got a beef soup and you can figure out from where it came.
We got fish on Fridays by which time we were so hungry we would have eaten the beef chops.
I managed to largely avoid institutions until this damned disease forced me to spend time in hospital.
But long-haul flights more than made up for that. You know the feeling: “I ordered the fish, this is chicken.” “Sorry sir, that is fish, no, hold on, it’s pork, no, it’s definitely the fish sir.”
I have had, don’t get me wrong, edible airline food. The nuts aren’t bad. And the occasional biscuit is passable.
In fact, it’s not that the food is actually inedible. Hunger makes the food edible.
It’s just that I wonder why someone somewhere goes to all the trouble of removing taste from things like chicken and potatoes and peas. I wonder why they don’t leave some flavour so you have a small clue as to what it is you’re eating.
It’s what they do in hospitals too.
I would love our health minister or indeed, the head of the Health Service Executive, to live for a week, if they could, on hospital food.
I am not suggesting the food is other than healthy.
It’s healthy enough.
Unless you’re talking about mental health.
Because it’s depressing in the extreme.
Mind you, now that I think of it, it’s not so bad that it couldn’t be improved if accompanied by a decent claret.

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Well, Charlotte, it was like this...

Someday, maybe in the not too distant future, my daughter Charlotte may ask me what life was like when I was a child.
At least, I hope she asks me.
Now, I know how boring the past is for some. I have personally witnessed eyes glazing over at the mere mention of the Sixties.
But for little Charlotte (she's not 18 months old and really isn't into my music yet) it will be important to know what life was like for her daddy. If she isn't permanetly on her phone and her computer, that is.
I made a little list for her. Ok. A big list.
Here, I will tell her, is what we DIDN'T have.
1 More than one television channel.
2 Colour television.
3 Live soccer on television.
4 Reality television.
5 Satellite television.

6 Personal computers.
7 Email
8 The Internet.
9 Mobile phones.
10 Playstation or Nintendo.
11 Health food.
12 Late night drinking (legally, at least).
13 Cheap air travel.
14 CDs
15 DVDs
16 Even the now obsolete videos.
17 iPods or any form or MP3 player.
18 Identity theft.
19 Digital cameras.
20 Digital anything.
21 Shredders.
22 ATM machines.
23 Chip and Pin.
24 Motorways.
25 Commuter rail services like LUAS or DART.
26 Greed.
27 Barbecues.
28 Sushi.
29 Chinese/Indian/Thai/Japanese/anything other than Irish or Italian, restaurants.
30 Wine (other than Blue Nun, Black Tower and Green Lable).
31 Chick Lit.
32 Bonsai trees in offices.
33 Sandwich bars on every corner.
34 Kebabs.
35 Karaoke.
36 Hair gel.
37 Botox.
38 B list celebrities, C list celebrities all the way down to Z list celebrities.
39 Multiplex cinemas.
40 Shopping malls or even shopping centres.
41 Enough taxis.
42 The money to get taxis.
43 Gap or transition years.
44 Work experience.
45 Points to get into college.
46 Two, three, four – or even one car per house in many cases.
47 Dishwashers.
48 Detergent tablets.
49 Quite as many corrupt and useless self-serving politicians.
50 Black pepper and sea salt.
51 Speed cameras.
52 Alternative medicine.
53 Dairy spreads.
54 GM foods.
55 Heelys.
56 Replica football shirts.
57 A Rugby World Cup.
58 A card-carrying imbecile in the White House.
59 Widespread availability of drugs. Other than a bit of blow. Maybe a tab of acid here and there. And a little speed.
60 Rap 'music'.
61 Footballers paid, per week, what most people earn per year.
62 WAGS.
63 Any concert venues.
64 Bad manners.
65 Booking fees for tickets.
66 Toll roads.
67 The Green Party.
68 Fridge-freezers.
69 Islands in the kitchen.
70 Stereo.
71 Remote controls for the television.
72 Property speculation.
73 Crap summers.
74 Foreigners and immigration.
75 Christmas ads in September.
76 Pat Kenny
77 Millions of radio stations.
78 People making millions out of Irish dancing.
79 Boy bands.
80 BMX bikes.
81 Latte, cappuccino or  mocha.
82 Croissants, bagles, Danish pastries.
83 Croke Park – as it is.
84 The Spire.
85 Smoke alarms.
86 Iraq and Darfur and tensions with Iran. (But we did  have Vietnam and Biafra and tensions with Cuba)
87 The Brit awards. The Soap awards. The Irma awards. The Meteor Awards. The Mercury Prize. The IFTA Awards. And so on.
88 Alternative comedians.
89 Wheely bins.
90 Wormers.
91 Anybody going to Leinster rugby matches.
92 Disc parking.
93 Smoke-free pubs.
94 Natural gas.
95 Church scandals.
96 Dirty hospitals.
97 Chuggers.
98 Garda helicopters.
99 Political correctness.
100 The cheek to tell our fathers they were boring when they told us about their childhoods.

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