“The anger rises whenever I look back at the hospital starved for funds that could at least have provided treatment for my weeping neighbour in the plastic ED ward, and a bed for myself in the extremis of despair, writes “The Gadfly” columnist ROBERT MACKLIN. 

TO me, it’s a simple choice – the tram or the hospital?

Regular readers will recall those unhappy nine hours I reported in July when advised by my GP to attend the Canberra Hospital’s Emergency Department for a possible clot in the heart. I suspect they’ll know which hand I’ll raise.

For the uninitiated, having arrived at 5pm, I waited the usual four hours among the chaos before admission to the ED ward. And there I languished among the plastic cubicles, half-dressed and half-gowned, while the machines that go “ping!” played their torturous chimes, and the neglected woman in the next cubicle gradually dissolved into heart-rending tears.

Time adopts a new identity in an ED ward, especially when the “pings” are out of tune. It staggers forward then stops, reverses, and tries again, this time slipping sideways and spinning till the “pings” unite, then starts the fandango all over again.

By 1am she had reached the end of her tether and escaped untreated. I followed an hour and 15 minutes later when the “bed manager” had still not found a cot for my admission to a treatment ward. And there, I hoped, I could put the experience behind me.

Alas, it has proved impossible. It turns out that while my heart was clot-free the ordeal to my then weakened state – physical and mental – produced a “setback” in my underlying COPD condition. The term describes the progressive descent of the symptoms – breathlessness, exhaustion, depression – toward the almost inevitable heart attack that finally extinguishes our brief candle.

One of the indicators became immediately apparent – a swelling of the ankles that signals heart failure, for which the best treatment is exercise and the occasional diuretic. 

That’s partly why we bought a unit with its own pool; but it’s not designed for the seemingly endless winter of 2023! 

Almost as frustrating was the mental cloud that formed around what had previously been my concept of the caring sanctuary of a hospital. This – in a nicer location – was the source of our greatest joy: the birth of our two sons, Robbie and Ben. And like most Canberrans we mourned its tragic passing when Chief Minister Kate Carnell made her one great mistake. 

But that terrible implosion is long passed. The Barr-Rattenbury government’s mismanagement of its horrible successor was now a clear and present danger in my mind, even though I knew deep down that its staffers were kindly and conscientious. 

The compulsory post-operative visits there loomed like advancing nightmares. The breathlessness, I suspect, was as much mental as physical. But that didn’t make it easier to bear, especially for a loving wife-cum-carer with her own natural concerns in the aging process.

Happily, a lifetime’s devotion to authorship stepped in as two major projects demanded my total dedication – the biography of Charles Weston, the unheralded creator of Canberra’s magnificent horticultural mantle; and the final scenes of my play, “The View from Golgotha”, set in the time and place of a great expectation.

But even they could not still the anger that rose whenever I looked back at the hospital starved for funds that could at least have provided treatment for my weeping neighbour in the plastic ED ward, and a bed for myself in the extremis of despair.

The outdated technology of a wildly expensive tramway seems a very poor substitute. Instead, I have a persistent vision of Mr Barr as Clark Gable in his famous final line of “Gone with the Wind“: “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

robert@robertmacklin.com