It is breakfast and I reach for a painkiller dropped off by a Boots delivery van. The sleep apnoea machine by the bed is beeping and I plug it in to the mains to charge. I can’t stop thinking about the disabled and ill people in Gaza; the dialysis patients who were halfway through their treatment when the power stopped, the children surviving off animal feed who can’t find bread, let alone a wheelchair.
I scroll social media and see the bodies of babies decomposing in an abandoned hospital, milk bottles and maggots next to their beds. I wonder had they been permitted to live, how much longer they would have survived. If they would have died in pain when the morphine ran out, or gasped for air when the ventilator batteries went to red. And I wonder if a quick death is what counts as mercy nowadays, in a place where no amount of suffering seems to matter.
