Ward 82

I've spent the last week or so as a near-constant visitor to a hospital urology ward. So many poor old busters with leaky plumbing, you just can't imagine. I've Seen Things that I ought not properly to have seen, given that I am not myself a urologist or an aficionado of high-def photography when the subject is the insides of urethras. In some primitive cultures I do believe that I would have had to have married people based on what I now know first-hand about them. There are no braver and better people on this good earth than the nurses who calmly accept that they have converted 17 years of education into a daily opportunity to be peed on by strangers who just can't help it.

Actually, maybe there are.

I admit it: I've laughed and giggled, snickered and rolled my eyes heavenwards a good portion of the last 7 days. I mean, what's not hilarious about a whole floor of old men running around in their underpants trying to aim accurately at plastic bottles and using paint-chip cards to judge whether their pee is more like watermelon or pink lemonade or cranberry or tomato soup or beets?

But that's not the point. The guy in the bed across the hall from my patient was a British sailor who as a child was tasked with watching for Germans from the village church tower and to this day has nightmares about Hitler and balloons. One of the roommates spent the last 55 years farming on this stubborn tundra; you should see the callouses on his hands. (No wonder he can't quite manage that bottle.) Buddy down the hall is a transplant from Atlantic Canada, where he learned how to make steamed birch snowshoes from his grandfather and then used them to fish and log, hunt and trap to support his 3 orphaned sisters. Sure, he's not a big fan of doing up his hospital gown but I guess I got time for that.

I can always look away, right?

 NO NO NO I CAN'T DON'T LOOK AUGH MY EYES MY POOR EYES.

I tried. I really tried. It was horrible. They are noble and children of the universe and everything but it was HORRIBLE DO YOU HEAR ME.