LIVES
Hospital visits
by Alice Goodman
Clerical life
ILLUSTRATIONS BY CLARA NICOLL
The easiest and cheapest way to get to the Cambridge University Hospitals from here is to drive over the hill to the Park and Ride, leave the car and catch a bus. The hospital is the first stop. This knowledge wouldn’t have been useful back in the days when I was driving my husband in for his appointments, because he couldn’t have managed the walk from the car to the bus and from the bus to the door. But it’s useful to me now. Now that I’m going in as a patient, that is. Not as a patient’s wife and advocate, not as a priest visiting parishioners, not as someone learning hospital chaplaincy, as I once did, and have the certificate somewhere to prove it. When I go into hospital these days, it’s generally as someone whose innards are being investigated.