it to Corrigan. The needle was into his
shoulder before he knew why his shirt was held up.

His wrath came like an avalanche; the discipline of two years was
forgotten, his Irish tongue was loosened. Sister shrugged her shoulders
and laughed; I listened to him as I cleaned the syringe.

I gathered that it was the indignity that had shocked his sense of
individual pride. "Treating me like a cow...." I heard him say to
Smiff--who laughed, since it wasn't his shoulder that carried the serum.
Smiff laughed: he has been in hospital nine months, and his theory is
that a Sister may do anything at any moment; his theory is that nothing
does any good--that if you don't fuss you don't get worse.

Corrigan was angry all day; the idea that "a bloomin' woman should come
an' shove something into me systim" was too much for him. But he forgets
himself: there are no individualists now; his "system" belongs to us.

Sister said, laughing, to Smiff the other day, "Your leg is mine."

"Wrong again; it's the Governmint's!" said Smiff. But Corrigan is Irish
and doesn't like that joke.

There are times when my heart fails me; when my eyes, my ears, my
tongue, and my understanding fail me; when pain means nothing to me....

In the bus yesterday I came down from London sitting beside a Sister
from another ward, who held her hand to her ear and shifted in her seat.

She told me she had earache, and I felt sorry for her.

As she had earache we didn't talk, and I sat huddled in my corner and
watched the names of the shops, thinking, as I was more or less forced
to do by her movements, of her earache.

What struck me was her own angry bewilderment before the fact of her
pain. "But it hurts.... You've no idea how it hurts!" She was surprised.

Many times a day she hears the words, "Sister, you're hurtin' me....
Couldn't you shift my heel? It's like a toothache," and similar
sentences. I hear them in our ward all the time. One can't pass down the
ward without some such request falling on one's ears.

She is astonished at her earache; she is astonished at what pain can
be; it is unexpected. She is ready to be angry with herself, with her
pain, with her ear. It is monstrous, she thinks....

The pain of one creature cannot continue to have a meaning for another.
It is almost impossible to nurse a man well whose pain you do not
imagine. A deadlock!

One has illuminations all the time!

There is an old lady who visits in our ward, at w