Babel Hospital

Photomontage of Péter Mátrai

With my long expected knee surgery I spent 5 days in the University College Hospital in London.

The operation itself under anaesthetics was appreciable for me only afterwards with its painful consequences.

The huge experience was the hospital itself: as the doctors, nurses, patients and other personnel moved on this stage like characters in a Babel hippodrome. Everyone acted according to their national features: to watch this human fabric was pure entertainment.

On the top the professionals: Dr Patel, the laconic Indian head surgeon and his disciplined young Chinese and Indian team. I’ll never forget the scene, when this beautiful Indian physician with her shiny long hair, in her blue T-shirt and with her handbag on her shoulder, who had just completed her daily visit with me dissolved a crisis in a moment when noticing the nearby English patient sitting in her armchair ill and foggy because of the forced gymnastics. She ordered all the hospital staff around who immediately lifted the patient into her bed and put her on infusion, oxygen and other life-saving cables without hesitation. A socking scene.

I have lost my sense of security when the beautifal, pinned-up-haired matron started to talk with her deep, oily male voice with an American accent. Her gestures were excessively feminin in contradiction with her broad back and thick wrist: I watched her in fascination. After the above crisis she left with raised head saying: now, you only have to continue breathing!

It was an amazing whirling presented by the Philippine, Moroccon, Maruritius, Polish, English and Bulgarian nurses, the lazy-moving black cleaners and porters, the unambitious indian night nurses sent by an agency with their daydreaming look. And 5 times a day the Ukrainian and African caterers, who served the 5 o’clock tea in the afternoons with biscuits. And what stories! I asked their life-stories at every possible occasion and they willingly told them to me.

And the patients: the short grey-haired English woman from Islington, reading always the Financial Times, with her typical short laugh at every inconveniences. Her daughter – a mixed black strict intellectuel without a smile – came in every afternoon, immediately closed the curtains around their place, and they started giggling for hours.

Opposite me Jacqueline from Kent, bound to her bed with cables for having been on artificial diet: she had some contamination. Forever talking on the phone in her delicious-sweet comic style while surrounded by visitors at the same time, she comforted and pampered them, and then she watched TV all night - she was adorable!

Beside me the black grandmother, who had always a big gathering around her and as birds, they chirped. If you closed your eyes, you felt yourself listening to the song of the jungle. The last evening a friend from church appeared, and they started a long pray on a low voice, beginning and finishing it with singing. This scene came into my heart.

I had a wonderful view from my window at the top of the building: to the right the slowly moving London Eye, in the distance the Center Point, to the left the St.Paul, the Gherkin, farther the Canary Wharf with its high bank-buildings.

Planes and gulls moved slowly under the mostly cloudy sky, helicopters took care of the security of the Londoners during the night.

A fascinating experience.