Eating the Underworld by Doris Brett

conversation. My guide takes us to the nurses’ station on the eighth floor and introduces me to the nurse who will be taking care of me initially. I am startled to find that the nurse is a male. I recoil at the idea of a strange man giving me sponge baths and helping me to the toilet. I suddenly realise that this is what male patients have to go through all the time. As it turns out, this male nurse will be the gentlest and most considerate nurse I encounter in this hospital. When his stint with me finishes after a day, I’ll yearn for him in the face of a succession of bristly, gruff and tough female nurses.
    My room is a private one with a window out of which I can just see a single large tree. I feel encouraged by this and bond immediately with the tree. I bond less enthusiastically with the bed and its thin, cotton hospital blankets. The mound of pillows is good though, reminding me of lazy mornings spent lounging in bed in the ‘peel me a grape’ pose.
    I unpack my bag on that first afternoon and get into bed. It feels odd and a little silly to be sitting up in bed in a hospital room when I’m perfectly functional. I feel like someone impersonating a patient. Martin leaves and the hospital takes over. I’m weighed, measured and tagged. My operation is not scheduled till four o’clock the next afternoon. Why do I have to be in here soearly?
    The answer is, I discover, to clean out my bowels. I am about to encounter the delights of an enema. As we chat over this procedure, my nurse tells me that I’ll also have to drink something to put the final seal on my bowels’ sparkling freshness. I’ve heard about this: stories about having to drink gallon after gallon of foul-tasting liquid. Luckily, what I have to drink has been condensed down to one glass. The foul-tasting part still holds though.
    I down it as quickly as I can, on the theory that the less time it spends in my mouth, the less time I have to taste it. Unfortunately, my taste-buds turn out to have excellent memories. I swallow the last drop and sit back in anticipation. I’ve been told that the effects will have the urgency of the last quarter of the last lap of the Grand Prix. Nothing happens.
    After a while, I get bored and go back to reading my novel. Still nothing happens. Some time has passed now. I have a dilemma: do I go to sleep, taking the risk that the nuclear-fission-type effects I have been led to expect from this concoction will impact on a mind too groggy to get out of bed in time? Or do I hang around awake all night? I decide to play my hypnotic tape instead. All is going smoothly until I come to the part where I’ve suggested that my bowels will recover from surgery rapidly and easily … boom! There’s no mistaking this signal. Back in bed again, I rewind the tape. Same thing happens. The instant I mention bowels, they leap into action.
    The next day as I sit up negotiating my way throughthe hours of ‘nil orally’ with an indignant stomach, the anaesthetist comes to visit. He is alarmingly young and launches into a discussion of the kind of post-operative pain control I would prefer. He sounds disconcertingly like the dietician discussing my menu plans for the day. I have a choice of epidural and intravenous analgesia. With the intravenous option, there is further choice—the standard model or a relatively new gadget that allows the patient a say in how much morphine is administered. You simply press a button to give you an extra spurt of pain relief. The machine has built-in controls to ensure you don’t overdose. I go for that one. Anything that gives the patient more say has my vote.
    With the decision-making over, I have something to ask of him. It’s becoming increasingly well-documented that patients, even under deep anaesthesia, can hear what is said in the operating theatre. They can’t usually remember it consciously, but under hypnosis can often repeat word