Ladies Who Lunch

(all things laid bare) 

Once upon a lifetime ago, I enjoyed a good catch up with friends over lunch or a hot tasty beverage and pastry. In recent years that has all fallen by the wayside as ill health has dominated my life completely and has dictated my comings and goings in every sense. 

One of the upsides of being in an open hospital ward is the kind of gentle camaraderie that is built over the days, as people from all walks of life are in a sense forced to share space and time together. With only a thin curtain separating the hospital beds, and this only drawn at night, it’s a case of ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’. To be fair, all ten women around me were lovely people. I have just lived an Elsa kind of life for so long, that I have become used to quietness and little external stimulation. Over the days however, I got myself into a little routine and made a wee nest whilst at the same time, being able to engage with others when I felt up to it.

Being a patient in hospital is a great leveller. The thing we all had in common was being too unwell to be at home, and needing to wear various monitors and gadgets for the medics to see what our hearts were up to 24/7. One could say we had a heart connection. We wandered around in less than flattering gowns and PJs, with bits showing that would never normally see the light of day in public. Our hairstyles were bedheads and there wasn’t a bit of makeup in sight.

Similarly, by the very nature of our circumstances and environment, our natural reserve and inner defences were stripped down. We dropped our dignity at the door. I love a bit of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). 

C, a white-haired 96 year old little bundle of delight spoke of her previous job as a cook, then when she reached 60, she became a nanny for another twenty years til she retired! She stopped driving when she was 92 as her eyesight got ‘a little bit hazy’. Then B, a 78 year old North Yorkshire lass moved up here 20 years previously but her husband died soon after so she has since lived alone with her little dog. She had expected to be in hospital for a day but was into her third week so a neighbour had kindly moved into her house to care for her beloved dog meantime. There was also M, the retired librarian who was extremely unwell and largely bedbound, so desperate for her scattered family to visit her ‘in time’.  One night I woke with her sitting frightened on the edge of my bed at 1.40am. I was able to hold her and calm her while the nurse then came to put her back to bed. Over the course of the week, tears were shed and shared by pretty much all of us on the ward. But it didn’t matter. There was no judgement nor awkwardness about it. There was a quiet understanding of the undercurrent of distress running in all of us, rising to the surface at different times then subsiding, as natural and accepted as waves on the ocean. 

 At noon each day, the cheerful health care support workers wheeled up the hot lunch trolley and dealt us each our plastic trays, dish of the day and blunt cutlery. Service with a smile. We ate together, food that most of us would not have chosen in a million years, but sustenance all the same. In a strange way it was a time of quiet fellowship. We’d decide that corned beef hash is maybe not so bad after all, and that semolina could even make a comeback someday. 

In our most vulnerable states there is a kind of raw honesty and acceptance which is able to surface, uniting us in our common humanity. No facades. Compassion flows and true courage brightly glows through the heart stories told in this kind of levelling environment. The often carefully crafted ‘make-up’ of how we think we should show up in this world to be accepted is stripped away, and we are seen and met in our bare fragile strength and humanness. 

Brené Brown describes vulnerability as: uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure. She says ‘ It’s our most accurate measurement of courage. If we are going to find our way back to each other, vulnerability is going to be that path.’  

Wouldn’t it be nice if such openness was our chosen daily common currency. I think we’d all be richer for it.