The George's Wife by Elizabeth Jolley

Author:Elizabeth Jolley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781742283586
Publisher: Penguin Group Australia
Published: 2009-07-22T04:00:00+00:00

The cough when it comes seems to start somewhere out of reach, it is a small cough and persistent. If someone else had the cough within my hearing I would be intolerant. It is my way of coughing, as if I am not coughing, which would irritate me if someone else was the one coughing.

The sputum mugs, all shabby and chipped, make me feel sick, they are ugly in the way they are made and ugly in their reason for being there. I know that there are all kinds of sputum and that the nurses are trained to observe the amount, the colour, the odour, the tenacity – whether it clings to a patient’s lips or is difficult to spit out. I am shy of this being watched. I know that they want to know whether it is coughed up early in the mornings or after a meal or after any kind of exertion. I know all the descriptions of sputum; abundant or scanty, clear or opaque, muco-purulent, bloodstained or rusty. It might be frothy, it might look like the juice of prunes or like egg yolk or, in my diagnosis, like sago grains. It can come up, if it does come up, in coin-shaped masses lying on the bottom of the vessel into which it is expectorated. This occurs when cavities are present.

The ordinary sputum cup has a little antiseptic placed at the bottom for the sputum to fall on. Patients who are allowed up have a pocket sputum flask made of blue glass with a screw-top lid and this, in order to avoid soiling the pocket, should be provided with a separate removable calico pocket …

For disposal, sputum may be poured over sawdust which is afterwards burnt.

It is all too familiar for me, this ugliness of the illness. This ugliness belonged earlier to other people and now it seems to be my possession.

Whenever I can, when I am allowed out of my bed, I leave the sputum mug in the most out-of-the-way places. There are not many such places.

‘Where is your sputum mug?’

‘I don’t have any sputum.’

Hides sputum, is recorded along with my temperature, pulse and respiration.

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