May Day in an NHS hospital

I think more than any other newsletter I’ve thought to write, of all the topics I’ve gotten into, I’m doubting this one. I paused for a long while right after the title and thought, this is just wholly unnecessary.

It’s also incredibly hard to be grounded surrounded by white walls and strange modular machinery (stand-up devices with the persona of Star Wars droids but an unfortunately Star Trek aesthetic).

But when I think about the writers I respect, like really respect, the most, I know what the answer is.

I could tell a joke to break the ice: what’s the worst part of flopping around on the ground of a London train station? In one of the most surveilled countries in the world, you’ll still never get to see what it looks like when you’re having a seizure. Do the other people just speed towards the turnstiles, do they stay close to you at least until the security guards are there (clearly an abdication of responsibility), or were there also some you didn’t notice as you gradually came back to yourself, farther along the periphery, who waited until friendly ambulance technicians arrived, the ones with whom you relearned to talk?

Can you see your face as you writhe? Are your eyes closed? Are they open? Does the person behind them know what’s going on? Is there another you who steps forward in moments like that? Can you thank him, even as you wish him never to come back?

You have long experience with dissociation, with extreme fragmentation, even, and it’s easy to think of this—your body was taken over, you have no memory between the times you were getting off the one train, shortly after your weekly dissociative nausea attack, incidentally, and when you were coming to in some entirely different part of the station, wholly unable to speak or move your body with precision—as more of the same. But maybe that’s metaphoric overextension. You know what that other stuff is from, and as the doctors run tests and talk about cerebral inflammations, infections, and far worse things, you can certainly hope it’s more of the same, but they don’t even seem to be considering that hypothesis.

And so it is that you find yourself in an NHS hospital on May Day. And the you is me, trying to be present, not to dissociate. It turns out the NHS is a really fine thing. Britain’s National Health Service, a public healthcare system that is high quality and free (for me, as a foreigner, the emergency part was free, but everything else, let’s not think about that yet). The technicians, nurses, and doctors are caring and knowledgeable, and they’re making sure I get a CT, MRI, whatever it takes to figure out what’s going on up in the old noggin.

If there are any progressives and reformists out there who think they would like something like the NHS in their country, where’s the button for the laugh track?

Free healthcare in Britain, just like the famously favorable labor laws and retirement age in France, are the results of revolutionary movements between and after the two world wars. Essentially, the reformists played their one master stroke, the only significant one they’ve ever pulled off, and they prevented anticapitalist revolutions in those two countries to keep them in what would become the NATO bloc. But they had to offer up some tasty bribes.

Once the memory of that compromise died out, political parties on the left and the right have been chipping away at it, and from what I hear there’s less and less left of the NHS every year. Though it’s still leagues ahead of what you’ll find in the US, where historically a greater part of those on bottom have been induced to identify with those on top, it being a settler state and all.

I can’t complain about the NHS’s current level of service. All things considered I’m pretty lucky. It’s tempting, though, to wish I were still following my schedule. If that were the case, I’d be in Amsterdam now sipping some beers in a squat bar (okay, probably not right now, since I woke up at 6 in my hospital bed and started writing, just to have something to do). Along with the US, the Netherlands is one of the few countries in the world that doesn’t celebrate May Day. They used a queen’s birthday to give the people another holiday right around the corner, the sneaky bastards. Though one year the squatters toasted her with a major riot. Before my time.

So I had been on a book tour for Solutions. A much reduced book tour, compared with how I used to roll. Just a few cities where I wanted to go anyways to visit friends. Since I’m biased in favor of the small, looked over towns, and since I don’t know how to say no, my ancestral Calvinism shows up in these ridiculously extensive book tours comparable to medieval penance rituals. One time I did 90 book talks in 70 cities in four months. (Incidentally, if there are any medievalists out there, I think if we want to understand the psychology of the penitents, try rock stars. The chronic exhaustion/adrenaline fix is probably comparable).

This time I was really proud of myself that I’d learned to have some limits and say no when I got requests for additional talks. Now that I’m stuck in a hospital with a future that’s more than uncertain, I’m not sure if the conclusion is that I can still feel proud of that because no matter what, I learned what I needed to learn, or… too little too late.

I also don’t know how to observe May Day in a hospital. A place where the workers need to be able to show up every day of the year and far from scabbing it’s an act of solidarity. Furthermore, it’s the quintessential institution, white walls, modular machinery, sterile plastic, (in a place of healing and dying, a place of waiting for test results, how is it they have no wood to knock on?!!) all of it keeping me as far as imaginably possible from the earthy, fecund roots of our revolutionary holi-day.

I suppose that’s why I got up at six in the morning to write. Because I don’t want to just wait around to get better. Because, for as long as I have, I want to come back to you.

Recommended Readings

The Solutions Are Already Here

Kafka Reloaded: Redefining Apparatus in a Series of Government Waiting Rooms