Ward C

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 haematologists 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.