On the Matter of Chemicals.

On my last night in hospital – and a particularly difficult night it was – I looked up at the ceiling of the ward and it looked yellow instead of its customary white. I was being bothered by a persistent fugg which I had been smelling and feeling all week, and it suddenly occurred to me just how saturated hospitals must be with chemicals. Chemicals in the functional infrastructure, chemicals in the furniture, chemicals in the fabrics, chemicals in the multitudinous array of sanitizing fluids, chemicals in the medications…

Several times during the week I had asked people what ‘that smell’ was. Nobody else had noticed, presumably because people in developed economies have become habituated to the burgeoning number of chemicals being used in such places. I’m different. Over the past ten years or so of increasing isolation from mainstream culture I have become less exposed to chemicals, both in the atmosphere and the food I eat. In consequence my body has become more sensitised to them and I’ve found them increasingly troublesome. I’ve also come to the view that they are probably unhealthy in random combinations.

I remember going to a few hospitals to visit relatives and so on as a kid. In those days hospitals tended to smell of stale urine and simple disinfectant, and I’m now tempted to wonder whether such an environment was more wholesome than the present one, suffused as it is with an invisible but possibly toxic mist. I don’t know whether I’m right or wrong, but I do know that modern hospitals are very uncomfortable to a person like me. And I further wonder whether they have become hazardous in ways separate from the big bacterial issues we’re all aware of.