Roughly one hundred kilometres

 It is now past midnight, therefore it was yesterday that started in the morning with the old man in the bed screaming in his sleep about needing to go to the toilet. The old man is fourteen years older than the teller of this story, and his life has not just been longer but harder too. He screams and groans and then is quiet.

At six it is light and the night nurse comes in to the room to check. The man now asks her for a painkiller, look at his face and see that he is crying tears. The night nurse is a woman with black hair and elongated black eyelashes and bloated lips, her arms are covered in tattoos. She goes into full emergency mode, checks the pipes connecting the man to  a bladder under his bed, trying to console him speaking the local dialect in a loud clear voice. She runs out to the stores and comes back with  a very large syringe full of clear liquid and using all her strength forces the liquid up the catheter, and then pulls it back down again. She does this again, thereby clearing the blockage. The man sighs in relief, his pain has gone. The nurse earnestly tells him that the next time that he feels such pain he is to use the emergency button. "Immediately" she yells, in a dialect. The woman is really concerned. Then she leaves the room, carrying a pail full of bloody urine, her flip flop slippers slapping the ground and her dyed black  hair blowing behind her.

There is a final examination to be made, an ultrasonic inspection. Say goodbye to the two men in the ward, the one that will stay there for a longer time, and the one who has been dismissed today. He is happy, his operation was a success and his cancer was removed. The other has an agglomerate  of illness, something urological and something cardiological and finally some mysterious chronic infection of staphylococcus aureus.

After the examination have a large cup of coffee in the cafeteria and then go out into the park to wait for the son.

He has kindly offered to collect his father, a round journey of roughly one hundred kilometres.