I arrive early for my vaccine appointment unable to escape the nagging belief that lateness will result in a refusal to put the long-awaited needle into my arm.
I am led through the car park and around the back by a volunteer from The Rotary Club.
The gardens have changed since I last visited, the land is clearer and more ordered than I remember, but the trees on the perimeter with the old psychiatric hospital in the background still swing to and fro in that way they did when I would watch them each week through the narrow window from the room upstairs.
“It’s all different. I haven’t been here for a long time.” I tell the Rotary Club man.
“That’s a good thing isn’t it?” He says with a smile that I find easy to decipher from his eyes, the only part of his face visible.
“Perhaps”, I think to myself.
Standing in line feels more like a church fete than a surgery.
Awnings erected protecting people from rain that is wonderfully absent in the early spring sunshine.
Everyone is amiable and relaxed. There is a palpable sense of something that feels like joy, but I can’t be completely sure.
After I have answered the questions and received my jab I am sitting waiting for the fifteen minutes prescribed, staring at the anaphylaxis kit that sits at the bottom of the stairs.
A lady with pink hair is speaking to a man far too loudly.
She seems almost drunk, euphoric, firing questions at everyone in random directions.
“Isn’t this a lovely surgery? You’ve got gardens. And there’s a pond! A doctor’s surgery with a pond. You’re lucky if this is your doctor.”
I nod with my eyes, invisibly.
She isn’t finished.
“That’s a lovely big building over there behind the trees. What’s that big building over there?”
Nobody says anything.
“That’s the old psychiatric hospital,” I say
“It’s apartments now,” the man next to me adds.
She turns back to the first man.
“Isn’t it lovely to be around people again? This is the most people I’ve been in a room with for a year. It’s weird isn’t it?” She laughs and the man says something I can’t make out.
I find myself judging the woman with the pink hair.
Why can’t she be quiet, talk more softly, keep herself to herself?
Dr McGavin retired now, but here administering vaccines as a volunteer, sits across from me but does not recognise me with my mask.
My mother worked for him for decades as a district nurse.
It was he who told me in this building exactly how my mother had died. How the aneurysm she’d suffered and fought for nearly twenty-four hours would kill most people in an instant.
It was he who recognised that I was both lost in her passing and found as a result of it.
It’s plain to me at this moment, as I cycle through all of my most pressing memories, that mostly this surgery has been a place of relief in some sense, even when it did not feel so at the time.
The woman with the pink hair is still talking and I see now that what she feels is relief and that I have been holding my breath for so long that I have almost forgotten what that feels like.
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