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Sodium 136, Carole Bromley

Calder Valley Poetry, 2019 £7.00

We are people

In this series of poems charting her stay in hospital for brain surgery, Carole Bromley does not mention her hospital number, or describe the surgery itself. No, what she does so well is chart her physical and emotional reactions to the approaching operation and then its consequences. She illustrates hospital experiences that, from time to time, many people have to face alone but in company.

She gives us insights into the reactions of her family, remembers her dying parents and shares glimpses of other patients and staff peopling the circumscribed world of the hospital.

The relationships with other patients and staff are necessarily fleeting: people are represented with first names and sometimes with physical or behavioural identifiers that individualise them. There is an over intimacy in these first names. They represent almost all we know of these people in their vulnerability — pushing drip stands, going to the toilet, or in their night wear.

These are people in need of each other while facing what is almost impossible to face. Through them, Carole Bromley quietly celebrates our humanity, vulnerability, interdependence, and individuality. There are touches of humour and a number of the poems end with stinging or poignant last lines.

Bromley reveals her own vulnerability and strength in ‘The Unpacking’, the central poem in the collection (it literally straddles the centre pages) and shows us the effect on her family in an equally charged poem, ‘High Dependency’. Having described the noise and confusion of the ward, she touchingly concludes:

We are people. The Polish man is Mika,
the screamer Audrey, the old man Barry.

The wards and beds have numbers — one poem is called ‘Neurosurgery Ward 4 Bed 8’. Sodium levels have numbers — 117, 118, 123, 124, and 136 at which she says, ‘I weep with joy’, and the last line of the final poem reads, ‘SODIUM 142. I’m going home.’

Although this moving collection is centred on Bromley’s own personal experience, I looked up from it with renewed appreciation for our shared humanity and, sometimes painfully won, love.

Peter Wallis

The patient’s voice

Carole Bromley insists the reader stands beside her. In a voice alive with details enriched by the eye and ear of the poet, she allows us an intense insight into her own experience of illness, hospitalisation, treatment and recovery. As a doctor, I am attuned to the patient’s voice and I found this collection a revelation and a delight. Meticulous and sometimes devastating, honest observations about herself and others are lightened by a wry sense of humour as in ‘Consent Form’:

The registrar reminds me of the dangers,
scaring me all over again.
Blindness, stroke, death is the gist.
He’s not anxious to proceed
on his own decision-making;
he needs the patient to do the hard part.

Encounters are elegantly understated. In ‘Afterwards’ she conveys the weight of a single word from the doctor:

She tells me it’s so she can compare.
Afterwards. I had not thought,
really thought of afterwards

The poet’s incisive voice encompasses staff and patients too — as here, in ‘Reading Henry James in Hospital’:

Sister trips
over the zimmer Jean parked by my bed,
tells me not to keep my frame there.
I do not have a frame, I protest.
Jean looks up from her article. Yet.

In ‘Neuro Ward 4 Bed 8’ the poet describes a world shrunken to a window framing a couple of pigeons on an ‘inhospitable’ roof:

How determined they are, my beautiful pigeons.
If only the man in grey would leave them alone.

This narrative sequence records a courageous struggle which is captured in the title poem ‘Sodium 136’. Her fluid intake is severely restricted, leaving her desperately thirsty:

The tea lady leaves me half a cup
and whispers I won’t tell them, love.
I do not touch it. 117, 118,
123, 124 and then, overnight,
SODIUM 136. I weep with joy.

The level of sodium in her blood has returned to normal. This inspired title for the whole pamphlet encapsulates recovery. I went willingly with this patient on her eloquent journey.