I’ve been in hospital for a month today.
I didn’t plan to mark it with anything. There’s no milestone worth celebrating at four weeks — no trophy, no certificate, no moment where someone comes in and says well done, you’ve been ill for a whole month, here’s a biscuit. You just keep going. The liver numbers come down, the steroids reduce, the blood sugar fluctuates, and one day you realise it’s been four weeks and you’re still here and still fighting and that has to be enough.
The liver, for what it’s worth, is finally doing what everyone needed it to do. After weeks of being stuck — peaking at 2,500, plateauing stubbornly around 2,000, refusing to move despite every medication adjustment — it has spent the last week quietly, unexpectedly, consistently coming down. 1,900. 1,700. 1,600. 1,400. 1,300. 1,100. 900 today, on reduced steroids, which matters because it means the improvement is real rather than just suppressed. Moving to oral steroids now. Discharge planned for Friday.
The blood sugar has been its own parallel story — spiking with the steroids, dropping as the dose reduces, hovering in a range that’s had people using words like diabetic state and monitoring carefully. The numbers are coming down alongside everything else. Almost certainly steroid induced rather than anything permanent. We’ll know properly in a few weeks once the steroids are gone and the dust settles. For now — watching and waiting, which has become something of a theme.
A month. Friday. Nearly there.
None of that is why I’m writing this chapter tonight.
I’m writing it from a different room to the one I went to sleep in, in the small hours of Wednesday night, because of a man called Phil.
Brian had been discharged and Phil came in on Sunday. Late seventies, cancer patient, in for investigations into some swelling around his heart — a side effect of treatment that had apparently been causing concern. He seemed lovely from the moment he arrived. Quiet, polite, the kind of man who apologises for inconveniencing you even when he isn’t. We’d only known each other a few days.
Wednesday evening, around quarter to eleven, this is what happened:
Phil: Can you do me a favour and shut my curtain? I’m going to use the wee bottle in the night.
Me: Sure. Are you cold too? Shall I shut the windows?
Phil: Yes, it’s a bit chilly.
Me: No problem. There you go. I’ll keep an eye on it and open them up again if it gets too hot.
Phil: Thank you.
Me: Just blood pressure to go and then we can get some sleep!
Two minutes passed.
Then I heard him being sick. Then heaving. Then silence where there shouldn’t have been silence.
Phil? Are you okay? Phil? Have you been sick?
Nothing. Just deep, laboured breathing.
I’m going to press my buzzer — I think you need some help. Sorry if I’m wrong.
The nurse arrived within thirty seconds. I told her I thought Phil had been sick and wasn’t responding. She called for help and within moments there were twenty people in that room. I was moved to the corridor. Ten minutes later I asked, and was told that Phil had passed away.
I typed all of this up at 22:46, sitting in the corridor outside, because I needed to put it somewhere before it slipped away.
People keep asking if I’m okay, and I am, and I find it strangely difficult to explain why.
I didn’t know Phil a week ago. I knew him for four days. I knew he was polite and unassuming and worried about the cold and grateful when you closed his curtain. I knew he had cancer and a swollen heart and was waiting for scans that I hope now weren’t delayed longer than they should have been. I knew he seemed more poorly than perhaps he or his family realised.
I didn’t want him to die. I’m genuinely sad that he did. But the depth of grief is connected to the depth of relationship, and I’ve learned over the last four weeks that you can hold sadness and steadiness at the same time without one cancelling the other out. Being okay doesn’t mean not caring. It means you’ve found a way to carry difficult things without being crushed by them — which, when you’ve spent a month in a hospital where difficult things happen to people all around you, becomes a kind of survival skill you didn’t know you were developing.
What I keep coming back to is the conversation itself. Curtains and windows and keeping an eye on the temperature. A small kindness before sleep. Those were his last words — ordinary, warm, human — and I’m glad they were exchanged with someone who meant them.
I pressed the buzzer. The nurse came in thirty seconds. I did what I could, which was everything I could.
It’s been a month.
Phil went home tonight, just not the way any of us wanted.
I go home Friday.
