Kurtz - in the hospital

alt An ageing relative has been in a critical condition for the past couple of weeks so my days have been peppered with regular visits to the ICU wing of a hospital. Now, an ICU wing is like a final stop in a sick person's life, I suppose. You either get out of it all covered up in a stretcher and ready to be buried or wheeled out to a lesser intensive care room, grateful for having survived a close brush with death.

On these visits to the ICU I pass a row of beds occupied with different individuals, most of them in semi-conscious stage but all with various tubes sticking out of them and hooked up to machines with flashing lights and numbers that make annoying beeps every so often.

At times a bed would be empty, more often because the occupier had checked out of this life altogether. Another individual in their death throes would soon take the place, and they would lie prone on their backs, decked out in green hospital robe, their mouth parted while big charts at the foot of their bed register the measurements of their heart rates, blood pressure, fluid in put and out put etc. On a rare occasion, a doctor in his white robe would drop by, consult the chart, probe the body around a bit and then leave with a discretion befitting a ghost.

Most of the time the ward is left to the devices of green clad nurses in white shoes who talk to each other in jovial voices and treat the immobile patients like children.

The patients lie helpless, unconscious or weak while they are being poked, moved around, wiped clean and have plastic tubes attached to bags of liquids inserted into their arms, neck or mouth. If their fluids are balanced, they retain some consciousness. Otherwise they lay practically comatose while their spirits wander.

The body after all is a sophisticated machine that requires perfect balance in every component to ensure a perfect function. Most of those in the ward suffer from severe malfunctions of some sort in their organs and the nurses are kept constantly busy monitoring and injecting things into their bodies in an attempt to correct them.

One patient in the ICU ward caught my attention because of the amount of noise he was making. From what he was saying (or moaning) he was not Indonesian. On a closer inspection from a discreet distance I saw he was European. The only Indonesian words I could distinguish were an emphatic 'tidak' (no) and a defiant 'goblok' (bloody idiot) whenever the nurses performed a procedure on him. The old man was obviously in a lot of pain and extremely cranky.

For their part the nurses tolerated him with a ready cheerfulness, calling him 'mister' and telling him to behave himself. His name was Kurtz (at least, it sounded like Kurtz) and he was just about the most petulant and noisiest patient you could get in a ward normally reserved for hushed voices or reverential silence.

Unlike the patients in the beds alongside his I did not see anyone paying him during all the days he was there. A nurse told me his sorry tale. He had lived in a seaside town in West Java alone. Sometime ago had had fallen over and injured himself. With no one in the house he crawled on his hands and legs for three days outside until someone found him bruised and bleeding on the side of the road and took him to a local health clinic. He could hardly speak bahasa and he did not have any money. Ot top of that he was a foreigner.

At some point someone got hold of the embassy who then arranged to have him brought to Jakarta and his medical care taken care of. And so there he was in intensive care unit, kicking and screaming with his arms and legs covered in sores and cursing at the world for all its worth with his lungs full of slime.

He was fortunate not to have been Indonesian, commented the nurse. Otherwise he would have died in the gutter or received substandard care where he would probably not recover from his injuries. As it was he had the undivided attention from the hordes of chirpy nurses who would make fun of his vocal display of bad temper.

He disappeared for a couple of days and the ICU ward was relatively quieter. He had been moved to a room. So, he was recovering, I thought. I wondered what sort of future held for an old European man, alone in a country where apparently he had lived in for a long time, but whose language he still could not master. Moreover, he was penniless. Did he still have families whereever he came from?

And then he was back. This time in a different bed, even noisier and more demanding than ever. He added a new word to his limited vocabulary which was 'kopi', meaning coffee. He would call for 'kopi' every now and then with a loud insistent voice. Most of the times the nurses would ignore his request, which was understandably enough as the place was not a cafe. Sometimes though one would come to him with a little cup.

Now, why would a dying man be calling out for a cup of coffee every few minutes? Turned out that on top of his miseries he was also an alcoholic and 'kopi' was his word for whiskey. I wondered if the nurses taught him the word to prevent him from crying out for whiskey in a loud voice in an ICU or it was his little invention to mask his addiction. A secret between him and the nurses who, despite the fact that he was abandoned and friendless, showered him with a lot of intention and good spirit, even if they did make fun of him every now and then.

Last time I passed Kurtz he seemed a lot better physically and his wounds were healing though he appeared thin and fragile. He was no longer hooked up onto so many machines. I wondered why they returned him to the ICU and kept him there.
But then, perhaps it was better for him to remain in the ward, surrounded by doting nurses who teased him when he screamed whenever they touched him and who responded to his every beck and call with a cheerful 'yes, mister', than to go back to a lonely and miserable life where he had to crawl on his hands and legs for days before anyone paid him attention.