The Virus
2021
The Ladies of Central Sterile Supply john wooding
S
o, we have finally realized that a functioning health care system is critical—and that those who work in it are heroes. As the world falls apart, and we begin to focus on the need to protect and honor our medical workers, a switch flipped in my head, and I got to thinking about a job I had in England, some forty-odd years ago. It was the mid-1970s and I was fresh out of college, looking for work along with the then millions of unemployed in England during that depressing decade. But I was lucky, landing a job as a delivery driver at Great Ormond Street Children’s hospital in central London. While this was not the preferred occupation for a newly minted graduate, anxious to join the middle classes, it turned out to be a blessing. I had mostly forgotten about it until now. The Children’s Hospital is spitting distance from Bloomsbury Square, home to England’s twentieth-century’s intelligentsia, and the likes of Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, and all that lot. I used to think about these luminaries as the Number 19 double-decker bus took me from Finsbury Park, where I lived, down through Islington to the Square and on to Great Ormond Street. On foggy mornings, I’d be on my second cigarette, sitting “upstairs,” staring out of a rain-soaked window and thinking about the usually crappy day ahead. The working life. I used to wonder whether the author of Mrs. Dalloway had ever taken the bus. I worked in the Central Sterile Supply Department (CSSD). I still have the ID badge they gave me. This was where equipment was packed and sterilized for use by the nurses and doctors, and the little patients above. Folks like me didn’t go in the main entrance but went around the back, next to the loading dock where the white van I drove spent nighttime hours. A door just to the side of the dock took you into a tunnel and the dark places, the basement warren of the hospital. In the tunnel the steam pipes and cables hung from the ceiling and showed the way. I can still see the asbestos-wrapped conduits with the word “STEAM” and an arrow stenciled on the side and the string of buzzing fluorescents that made pathetic efforts to light the way. A short walk under stalactites of hangers and rusty bolts, past the main boiler room, got you to the door of the cleanroom of CSSD, my workplace. Someone told me later that the gigantic boiler had been sitting there, doing its thing, since the end of the last century. It sure looked that way to me. The basement of the hospital, honest to god, was like being in the bowels of the Titanic. People who work in white-collar jobs rarely see the underbelly of the buildings they are in or the people who labor there, and I am pretty sure that was true for the passengers on the Titanic, too. But the cleanroom was as bright and spotless as the tunnels were dirty and dark. I still remember the feeling of relief on opening that door, like getting into a warm car on a frigid evening.
The Lowell Review
23
