Mum spent a week at Christchurch Public Hospital and I got to spend a lot of time there too. Being in a hospital is reminiscent of a baseball game, a type of sport of which I am not enamoured. There’s a lot of waiting interspersed with short periods of intensity. No wonder someone in hospital is called a 'patient'.

You wait for the doctors to do their ward rounds so you can discover the doctor's thoughts regarding the patient. Ward rounds may happen at any time of day and each day is different – waiting is the only choice to catch the doctors.  You also get to wait for other healthcare workers, such as a physio in Mum’s case, who came to assess Mum's level of mobility to decide where she would go after the hospital.

While you are waiting in a hospital you can observe all the different patients in the ward. The only good thing about hospitals is how you feel relatively healthy compared with the patients. In Mum’s ward, there were a plethora of older men with dementia, or Parkinson’s Disease, generally admitted because of a medical incident such as a fall. Most of them snored very loudly when they were asleep. Some of them slept the majority of the time. There was an orderly posted at the end of the ward because some of them men were supposedly flight risks. I never saw any of them moving spontaneously or fast. Mostly, they stayed in bed, prone or sitting up, doing absolutely nothing.

Nurses came and went, attending to patients. They helped patients go to the toilet, have a shower, took their blood pressure, temperature and oxygen saturation at regular intervals, administered medicine. I chatted with some of the nurses. They changed every day – you’d get friendly with a nurse then the next day there’d be a new one. No wonder there were issues with continuity of care – despite doctors and nurses alike tapping information into iPads, and every staff member I met being focused on patient welfare, there were perpetual holes in communication.

Mum’s pain killers would be charted one way then a new nurse would come on, consider they could be done better and request recharting without any information on the rationale for the first charting. Part of your role as a patient advocate turns out to be relaying information between medical staff. "Mum's painkillers aren't charted at breakfast so she can have a painkiller on request before breakfast because sometimes she in pain at 6am."

"Oh," the nurse says, "I hadn't realised that."

Erin was a cheery nurse we saw for a few days in a row. As I asked about Mum’s current blood pressure one morning, she said to me, “Hold still, there’s a spider on your shoulder.” I wasn’t concerned about the spider given the lack of dangerous spiders in New Zealand. However, I was in a hospital and she was a nurse so I dutifully held still while she flicked the spider off my clothing and onto the linoleum. Then she stamped on it.

I flinched. Death without a second thought. Why did a perfectly healthy spider need to die? It wasn’t hurting me. It wasn’t going to harm anyone else. It probably didn't have much of a future inside the hospital – would likely be swept or mopped up in quick order. However, did it need to be deliberately killed? Could we have put it out the window to give it a chance of survival? Spiders are even specifically useful to humans, catching flies which spread disease, if we are going to consider utility as the basis for the right to survival. In the bigger picture, spiders are part of the complex living ecosystem we need to sustain our lives on this planet. Should our instinctive reaction be to stamp?

I looked across the room at Hamish snoring in his bed, a human who doesn’t talk with anyone anymore. A human who no longer has the capacity to care for himself. A human who needs huge efforts of care from a range of other humans to keep them alive. I am programmed to regard Hamish as superior to a spider. But why?