Ireland: Nil By Mouth

Politics can be likened to a hospital and taking the pulse of a patient is where the politician plays doctor and the ’citizen’ is the patient. In this case, Ireland. Figuring out the right temperature, the applicable medicines needed, is the key to keeping the patient alive just enough that he or she considers the doctor an extended member of the family, a friend, someone to lean on. At the end of the patients bed lies a chart, a history of ailments and complaints, that is indicative of the offending condition that the patient thinks he is suffering from. Also there was a sign over his bed: Ireland- Nil By Mouth

Passive medicines labeled appeasement, and meant only in small doses, and a large dose of placebos is the order of the day and the patient wonders endlessly will he ever get better, but does not blame the doctor, after all he knows best. Then one day, unknown to the doctor, the patient forgets his medicine. Not wanting to upset the doctor, he keeps this information to himself. The next day, for the first time in years he actually felt better. This was of great interest to him.

Another day passed, and he did not take his medications and felt even better yet again. For the first time he questioned what was going on, and like before, these questions were asked only of himself, that decided finally he would not take his medicines at all this week, or the next. Later too, the doctor became alarmed for even he could see the patient was actually getting better.

An epiphany of sorts had happened for the patient that would change him for good. Lying on his back, he looked back at the trail of tears that had brought him to his awareness: the lies wrapped up in double speak, the patronizing sound-bites sealed with a kiss and the promise that his condition would improve. But many things had already happened and seemingly irreversible ones while he had been in his long comatose state. Bad things.

He remembered just to get treatment in the first place, he was told it was a matter of life and death and that had to sign a waiver besides, that should it be the latter, the hospital or the doctor would not be at fault. So he hurriedly signed papers without his glasses on that gave power of attorney to his doctor and the hospital as well, that was also a promissory to a debt that he had no hope of paying off, not in his lifetime anyway or that of his grandchildren. It was a debt, give or take a billion or two, for over €75 billion.

When the mists cleared from his memory as he fluffed up his pillow, he had much time already to digest, and after many hospital dinners, that he would be charged for just living at his own property and this one too, and now over the flickering images on a cheap TV above his bed, he learnt they were now going to charge him for his drinking water, just after it seemed that they had taken everything else. Yes, he felt like a fool and bad when he thought too much. He was now thinking about thinking.

Yes, he thought in his thinking,  I have suffered a thousand surgical cuts, so finely sharpened and balanced that I did not know that it was happening. All that I thought I owned is owned by another, even my soul is a matter of state, for even there they will take such a fee for the little I will leave behind that it would indebt my children even further. What can I do.  I must do something but what is it……?

To be continued..............

By Barry Clifford