When a Stranger Resembles Your Dearest Companion
- Category: Gender
- Date 19-03-2006
- 325 views
What makes many people’s ability to accurately recognise the things and persons they know? It might be difficult for someone to spontaneously tell the number of buttons on their shirt; the colour of their trousers; the complexion of their spouse or the exact size of the room they sleep in. Suppose your child suddenly went missing, would you fortuitously construct a lifelike image of him to the attentive public?
Not many people can colourfully describe their parents, children, spouses or relatives without looking closely at them for purposes of assembling the descriptive content. If you stop reading now and try to memorise the precise features of your close associates, you would probably evoke their less boisterous features: dress code, way of walking, and speech habits more than their effusive looks.
Suppose a comrade lay silent and motionless in one place, it would possibly be a while before you could attach name to body and recognise the individual. This explains why probably a stranger ever greeted you excitedly, calling you the person you do not know. Have you ever mistaken an individual in the same way?
No wonder, one would rather read or write about the person one knows than store such a person’s accurate image in mind. Photographs are commonplace articles nowadays, and many people spend their time observing their loved one’s picturesque portraits other than watching the living individual because of timidity, distraction or divided attention. Inevitably, such culminates into weird mix-ups like the story below.
One day, a series of errors led to a man holding vigil at the bedside of a woman he wrongly believed to be his sick mother, whereas his genuine mother lay dead adjacently. Nurses had notified the man to report to the Conquest Hospital in Hastings, East Sussex, last year, to attend to his mother who was dying.
Arriving at the hospital in a feat of tension and fear, the man identified a wrong patient and sat with her, as his real mother lay dead in a nearby room. In the meantime, another family was wrongly told that their mother was dead. The confusion had purportedly been heightened by an internal report, warning of a ward virus, which meant patients had to be moved around. Besides, there had been an increased number of visitors on the ward during that period leading up to the scandal.
It (the report) was released revealing that the virus had led to an outbreak of diarrhoea and vomiting. The unfortunate man arrived at the hospital and identified the wrong patient as his mother. Then, because the patient's wristband was not checked, staff at the Conquest wrote the wrong name of the patient above her bed.
Interestingly, the two patients were both elderly, looked similar and were unable to speak because of serious illness. They were also receiving similar treatment in adjacent rooms. The blunder only came to light when the man's daughter arrived at the hospital and noticed that her father was attending to the wrong patient.
When the young lady entered the room, she recognised that the woman, at whose bedside her father desolately sat, was not in truth her grandmother. She went ahead to alert the ward team. Recognising the blunder, the hospital apologised for the anxiety and strain caused to both families and promised to ensure that such an incident could not happen again. The drama ended, and only then did the man begin to grieve over his deceased parent!
All right, the hospital personnel started the mess but for a grown-up man to identify another woman for his mother was most outrageous, moreover when he should have fanatically attended to his dying mother!
On a few occasions, people I have never seen move over to me, call me by wrong name and remind me that we met at a place I have never been to, even in a foreign country. This means they are so forgetful that they believe they know the person they do not know.
By Venansio Ahabwe
Source: Peering Eye, Sunday Citizen