When well-meaning visits become a pain

All of us go through this at some time or the other in our lives. We have friends or relatives who are unwell, either hospitalised or confined to the house. We think it is our duty to visit them, take flowers or fruit or even sneak in some chocolate if they express a desire to indulge their taste buds and get a break from the bland food they have been prescribed.

In our small colony of retirees, there is always an acquaintance or a friend who is not doing too well. The symptoms of their ailment, the diagnosis, the treatment: all these form part of the conversation as we march around on our morning constitutional and make plans for when we will bring happiness and light and laughter to that poor soul by paying them a visit!

Noble intentions. And for years I went along with them. I marked my attendance at the hospital or in a sick person’s home to convey that I cared. Sometimes, I stood outside an intensive care unit (where even the immediate family’s entry is banned), knowing full well that I couldn’t really do a thing to actually help. I told myself that I was there for the family, to bring them a home-cooked meal, to give them moral support, to try to take their minds off the dire circumstances. But what I wound up doing was distracting them with social talk, tiring them further by making them go through repeated recitations of what happened and how it did ...

Too much to handle

It was only when I became the caregiver for dear ones during major illnesses that I understood the toll taken by well-meaning visits and the frequent phone calls from friends and acquaintances. They consumed the patient’s strength and took up time better devoted to the patient.

There were occasions, of course, when the patients themselves wanted visitors. They looked forward to talking with friends about a serious meeting they had missed or ‘fun’ social do they had last attended together — and they were not happy with my forbidding presence and the fact that I curtailed visits to below 10 minutes when visiting hours at the hospital clearly stated that there were another 110 minutes before they had to leave!

But I was unrelenting. I believed that the patient’s immunity was seriously compromised and she could do without all those ‘Hello’ and ‘Goodbye’ hugs that left her open to all manner of infection.

I had also experienced, first hand, how a welcome distraction for a patient who did not want to dwell on her disease or her treatment and got involved in a discussion on a topic of interest kept going for over an hour on an adrenalin rush that elevated her mood – followed by a low that had her back in the ICU for four days... and had me in a spin for twice that amount of time.

I am therefore pretty clear about one thing: avoid sick visits.

And yet, today, I too want to be at my ailing friend’s side although she is in another town and has a large and loving family around her. I want to hear her voice, breathless and weak though it may be. I want to share a laugh with her — I want to get a laugh out of her.

But each time I pick up the phone to call her or try to fix a time when it will be suitable to meet her, I go back to the days when I was the harridan keeping visitors away — and I put down the phone and settle for an SMS instead ...

Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India.