Shower

I was roasting like a fat boar on a spit in the 40C heat at Frimley Park HMP again. I couldn’t even get out of bed and leave the ward to look for some shade. The doors were locked and only staff had cards to let you in or out. Apparently, I had a marker against my name on the hospital’s system that said I was not allowed to leave the ward, and I didn’t know why.

Every time I asked someone a different excuse was given “Oh it’s because you have low blood pressure and have fallen over before”, the other one was about leaving the ward with a canular in my arm. Not that any nurse knew that it wasn’t a magic way of getting drugs into your arm as you needed special barrels that fitted the canular and they weren’t exactly High ST shop items.

I was hot and depressed, so I started asking why I was not allowed to leave the ward like the last time I was here. “I don’t know” was the standard answer, “but you can’t”. Even in this heat wave, I could not escape it to find somewhere to rest in the shade, it was torture.

So there we were, 3 men in a row all in their boxers just roasting away as the sweat dripped off our foreheads like a faulty tap. I couldn’t be bothered to speak, or even do anything but stare at the cupboards in front of me and wonder what was in them.

Then at change over time at 6 pm I got up. “Right, I’m having a shower,” I said defiantly knowing most of the wet rooms were being used as spare closets for chairs and boxes of crap.

I removed each item one by one all whilst the nurses were looking at me as if I was doing something strange. “No love I’ve roasted all day coz you can’t even afford air con or even a fan but you’re busy wasting another £20bn on a new computer system that you will probably not even use like the last one you had”.

Why couldn’t they start with the basics like a fan or air conditioning before wasting millions on new systems that did nothing much more than their last one?

In fact, it was worse, your GP doesn’t even get the discharge notes automatically, or carry out the wishes of the hospital doctors, and there is no backdating. That means on their new “Epic” system there is no history of my previous stays or operations.

I got stripped off in the wet room, put my towel on the peg, and went over to the shower. I turned the round handle and, nothing, not even a drop came out. I looked at the head and there was nothing to turn it on or off, so I just pulled it hard, and the head came straight off and BOOM, a powerful gush of water hit me straight in the face. The water gushed out of the headless pipe like one of those fire hydrants you see in American films with kids dancing around it in circles.

Everything was getting wet, my clean clothes, and apparently, it was flooding the ward under the door. Knocks on the door kept repeating themselves. “What are you doing the water is coming out into the ward” I heard. “So”, I replied.

“I’ve roasted all day in this heat, and no one has done anything to help me, I’m having a shower”, and I did. It flooded the ward and the wet room, soaking every piece of clothing, towels, and bag I had brought in, but I didn’t care. It was the best shower of my life and I said sorry to no one. 

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