Watched the beautiful documentary series by Coen Verbraak about the Amsterdam hospital OLVG. What is it that we want to find out by questioning doctors and visiting hospitals with cameras and notebooks? Something about the secret of being sick and healing, about life and death, about care and decisions that have far-reaching consequences. Perhaps ‘we’, both the viewers and the journalists, also want to be reassured, to be sure that the doctors are sensible people, the nurses are knowledgeable and caring.
Out of the picture, as usual with such reports, the patient remains. Not that we don’t see any, but they are little more than an illustration of how something had gone well or not so well, an example of nice or unkind behavior.
I myself have sometimes made such a report in a hospital, and I was full of admiration for the professionalism and commitment of the people who work there. I saw how crucial the role of the nurses is, and how good and dedicated some of them are. I even went along with terrible bad news conversations. For a moment, fifteen minutes, you sit in a room with someone who is told that his or her life is over – and then you are gone. Back to the professional world.
The patient is always alone.
It is almost impossible to make a report from the patient, because there is so little to report there. It lies or sits or waits. He may not even be in the hospital, but tries to reach a doctor or a ward from outside, or he lies in bed and sees a ward doctor come by in the morning, who hears some information from the nurse, assesses the situation in one minute: “How are you feeling? May I have a look at the wound?” and then it’s gone again.
One doctor says: stay one night, the next that it can take up to four days. The nurse speaks in advance of a small cut, the surgeon of a gash of seven centimeters. The ‘attending physician’ is a name under letters who may be given and discuss data somewhere in a department, but not with the patient. Not that the patient would always have something to discuss with the doctor. Sometimes a question arises, the nurse provides an answer. One of many nurses, because there is always a different friendly face and a different cheerful voice for the morning, the afternoon, the evening, the night. The patient does her best, or not, to establish human contact.
The patient suffers, worries, waits, fears, is bored and experiences the hospital as a completely different place from the medical staff. An operating room is not the everyday working area with the familiar faces of colleagues, but the slightly frightening room in which someone will put a knife in your body, and you will emerge differently than you entered. Better. Worse. Otherwise.
The experience of being a patient cannot really be captured in a report, it should be portrayed very differently. Not by a doctor at work, but by the silence in the sick room in the morning, the sound of rubber soles and voices in the corridor, the view of winter air and bare branches, the careful shuffling to a toilet.
Through a representation of lostness in an impersonal space.
Through the imagination of security, because you are taken care of.
A version of this article also appeared in the January 9, 2023 newspaper