Witness account · 3 min read · Set in St. Kilda Infirmary ·
The Requests of the Discharged
A hospital radio volunteer describes a winter of request slips that appear to have been filled in by people no longer on any ward list.
- reliability: disputed
- witness: "Denys Okonjo, hospital radio volunteer"
I do the Tuesday request show at St Kilda Infirmary, have done since 1980, and everyone involved agrees I am wrong about this, which is why I agreed to write it down.
The way the slips work is this. There is a perspex box at the foot of each ward and a pad of slips, green for long-stay and white for general. Patients or visitors write a name, a bed number, and a request; the sister posts the box down once a day; if the request is proper we play it. We do not play everything. A ward sister can pass a slip without comment if the patient would rather not be named aloud, and nobody asks her why, because it is her ward. I have never once been told a reason in eight years, and never once needed one.
On the 6th of January this year, a white slip arrived for a Mrs Alma Peed in bed 11 of Corbie ward. I read it out at 19:40 and thought nothing further. Except Corbie ward is the geriatric annexe now, and bed 11 was empty that week, because the bed-board said so. And Mrs Peed, the discharge clerk told me the next morning, when I went and asked, was discharged to her family in Septon in the autumn of 1983. Four years gone. The inference does not need me to spell it further, and I have resolved to leave it where she left it.
But a slip is a thing anyone could write, I said that to myself at the bus stop, and I believe it still. Someone with a recollection of the ward going through her distant troubles. So the next week I got the ward sister on Corbie to lock the box after evening rounds and post it sealed, and she agreed, no fuss, as though I had asked her to check a window.
The box still arrived with slips in it.
That is where my account stops being believed, so let me set it out carefully. Inside, on the 13th, three slips. One was for bed 11 again, a different handwriting entirely, rounder, in ink, not the name Peed. It was a Mr Hollis Quarvey, and the clerk found him in the records as discharged in 1979, to a place the clerk did not read out to me, and I did not press, because her voice had already gone to the flat tone people use about that place.
Since January there have been, by count, eleven of them. Every one dated the day it arrived, and dated properly — the pads are pre-printed with the year, you cannot get that wrong without tearing a page out. Every one a patient discharged some years back. Never twice the same person, never anyone currently on a ward list. And the nurses who sort the pre-round slips say the quietest thing of all: when the old ones come through, the current patients do not complain of the show that week. They say the ward sleeps better. One sister told me that much and no more.
I reported it, first to the show's coordinator, then by the proper channel, and there is now an incident note, and the note says, benefit of the doubt, a hoax by persons unknown. I was spoken to kindly about the worry this was causing me, which I did not have until they spoke to me kindly about it.
The coordinator says volunteers mishandle pads all the time, and the sister says her box was locked, and the two of them have stopped saying it in front of each other. My niece came in with me one Tuesday to see for herself, and she watched the box come down sealed and opened it with the sister, and there was a slip inside for a man discharged, the clerk later confirmed, the year before I was even born. She confirms the box, the seal, and the date. What nobody will confirm is who the requests are requesting.