Hospitals can be quite dehumanising. It’s filled with sounds of machines whirring and humming and beeping reminding us how fragile we are. Yet a friendly voice can make it entirely human and entirely bearable. This nurse was one of the friendliest I’d heard. Actually cheery and chatty. He had his music on which he whistled tunelessly to. Through sound and his own disposition he transformed what often can be a ‘clinical’ and sub-human environment into something of flesh and blood as real as the red stuff he extracted from me.