Hi Everyone. I haven’t posted or visited for a long time and did not really wish to just jump in and derail the order here with a new thread, but I am so upset that I must express my shock and pain in some way.
My mother, a stalwart but introverted agnostic of advanced years was hospitalised for pain control and what turned out to be massively metastasized cancer during November 2015. Apart from the distress caused by the diagnosis, only a powerful cocktail of narcotics including morphine could relieve her pain – which led to a state of such confusion that she failed to recognise me on several occasions. I always visited during the day and not during the official visiting hours.
On several occasions, she asked me if she was dying, and then asked me a another question: “What is all that singing about? Who is singing that stuff?” The mystery caused her great distress but I always assumed that she was delirious - until this evening, when I arrived and stayed later than usual.
At 19h30, the medical nursing staff, under the watchful eye of the Ward Sister, burst into an apparently routine twice-daily performance of ‘powerful, healing christian songs’ aimed at soothing seriously or critically ill patients in the oncology ward.
That was when I realised that my mother, in her drugged state, had somehow concluded that her possibly impending death and these bursts of christian songs were somehow related. I finally understood that she suffered from a fear of death/singing angels-induced anxiety, possibly due to feelings of guilt over rejecting religion amidst a peer-group in mass hysteria about her aberrant life path.
My heart breaks for my mother who is trapped in her own treacherous, drugged mind, who dimly realises that she has reached the end of the line, who is physically helpless and unable to protest this gross violation of her basic right to choose silence in a public facility.
The (no doubt well-meaning) MEDICAL staff is VIOLATING her right to come to a peaceful inner acceptance of her serious medical condition. The fact that she represents a generation where religion ‘reigns supreme’ makes this even more distasteful and doubly vicious, as people of her age must keep quiet or be utterly rejected by her peers. It transforms this rather basic violation of her rights into a brutal assault on her already bruised and vulnerable psyche.
I am just appalled, saddened, and paralysed by this barbaric situation. Hospital Management probably approved these officially sanctioned assault sessions after an airy: “What’s the harm” -type of consideration. My (mild and bewildered) protest was met with: “Oh, it’s a wonderful part of our (black) staff’s rich cultural life”.
What is the harm? Are you fucking, fucking serious? She doesn’t need this shit in her life right now!
Perhaps I will be able to articulate my argument tomorrow or on another day.