DFW

Ward C

David F Williams, PhD, DSc, FREng, FLSW
Author, Scientist & Consultant

Hospitals are rarely bright and beautiful places, as worried patients, families and friends mix with earnest professionals doing their best for those in their care. I have a genetic condition that is not at all troublesome, as long as I have five or six phlebotomies every year, where a volume of blood, and the excess iron it contains, is removed from my body and thrown away. My condition thus requires me to attend a hospital, wherever in the world we are, for this procedure, which is usually done in the cancer ward – since that is where hematologists largely work and where the nurses have the skills to painlessly get into the veins. So I am treated in a ward surrounded by patients with the most serious of conditions.

Ward C

I sit on a bed
Not unhealthy but in palliative care
Around me, the smiling dying
Taking transfusions and chemos
Like infants at the breast
Wide-eyed, safe at the succor
Embraced by the fleshy but sexless carers
Who leave their own problems at the door
And administer to, and talk to, and
Engage with those who do not know
What tomorrow will bring

I do

I read the news while the blood drips out
The technical leak that keeps me healthy
While the murderous leash of cancer
Remorselessly expunges hope from those
In their anemic, leukemic state

Chester, England, April 2004

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