I went to visit a friend in hospital but he was asleep when I got there. The nurse explained that he had a very restless night and it would be better to leave him to sleep.

I noticed that the patient in the next bed had no visitors and, as I had to wait the best part of an hour for my bus home, I decided to have a chat with him. It turned out that he was foreign and didn’t seem to speak much English but I did my best. After only a few minutes, he became quite agitated, snatched off the mask he was wearing, blurted out some unintelligible words and collapsed into unconsciousness. I called the nurse, who call the resuscitation team but it was too late – he had passed away.

I realised that I had heard his last words. It was my duty to try to fulfill his dying wish. I wrote down his words, phonetically, as best I could while they were still fresh in my mind. They didn’t sound French, Spanish or Italian but I thought that it could be German or Scandinavian. A German speaking friend suggested that it was more likely eastern European. After trying, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, and various others, with the aid of Google Translate, he eventually came up with a rough translation:-

“Get your chair off my oxygen pipe!”

DC