From the Hospital Bed

It was her appearance, which first drew my attention to her. I was in the local hospital for a simple appendix operation. Beside me was an eighty-two year old lady in a bright pink bed jacket. She was completely covered in bruises. Her grey hair was bedraggled and wiry. Her skin was dark and ugly.
“God help her,” I thought.
My teenage curiosity got the better of me and I started to talk to her. During that week the old lady and I became good friends. Her only visitor was her niece who brought her new bedroom slippers.
“These aren’t mine,” she announced to a nurse the next day, unaware of the slippers she’d been brought. It was then I realised she was suffering from dementia.
The old woman had lots of stories to tell. She was Canadian but hadn’t lived there for 40 years. Every night she related stories of her childhood. We had conversations about her family, her house and the little town in Saskatchewan, where she’d lived. She confided in me. Telling me that she hated the health service, she felt the nurses and doctors were rude to her and she told me she would have to interview the manager about the conditions of the ward.
One morning she got up, dressed into her out door clothes and sat beside her bed. “Waiting for the train,” she told the nurse. Confusion had taken over this woman’s life. She’d been popular in her youth but was now alone, in a strange place, unaware that she’d been in a car accident and unaware of the terrible bruising to her body. The poor woman hadn’t seen the tractor as she approached the corner. She’d driven straight into it!
A week later I left that ward wondering why the elderly are permitted to drive! My new friend had died the night before.