Linda

Linda is a patient on the PAAZ whose forceful presence is shaped by both her professional life as a fire-service commander and her experience of alopecia. Emma first mistakes her baldness for the effects of cancer treatment, but Linda corrects the assumption: her hair loss is a serious, lasting illness in its own right. In the ward she is not a passive observer. She questions unsafe conditions, helps organize the group, and notices when other patients might need practical support. Her eventual decision to leave reflects her view that being hospitalized for a problem does not guarantee that the ward is the right place to address it.

Arrival and first impression

Linda makes herself conspicuous from her first morning on the ward. She arrives after breakfast, gets coffee, and quickly arranges for the living room to be prepared for the day-opening meeting. Emma initially has difficulty deciding whether Linda is staff or a patient: there is no name badge to clarify her role, and Linda’s grey cotton cap only partly conceals that she has lost her hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes. Tall, thin, and visibly exhausted, she nevertheless seems ready to challenge the room. Her first intervention is not tentative: she raises a concern about the door and the danger of spending time in the living room without an extra sweater, using the language of a suicide attempt to convey how serious the situation feels to her.

The force behind that complaint becomes clearer when Linda describes the open ward. Staff in their office cannot control who comes in or goes out, she says, and she does not feel safe. She would almost prefer the locked ward, where she would at least see staff outside the day-opening and where a door actually locks. When Emma mistakenly takes a cup that she thinks belongs to the ward, Linda does not turn the error into a confrontation. She says it could happen to anyone and lets it go; her larger objection remains the ward’s lack of security. The contrast captures her manner: she can be forgiving about an individual mistake while staying insistent about a problem she believes the institution should fix.

A practical, critical presence

Linda’s energy does not make her an admirer of ward routines. When Emma says she will not accompany the planned move and would rather leave that day, Linda compares the day-opening unfavorably with spending the morning on the terrace, away from the nursing staff. She questions the point of a meeting when nothing changes. Emma, watching the group fall silent, sees in that moment how little ordinary sociability the ward can offer. Linda’s criticism is less a rejection of other patients than a demand that the group’s time and concerns lead somewhere.

She also recognizes that other people’s needs may require accommodation rather than a test of will. When Iefke struggles to get through a door, Linda calls the difficulty a real obstacle, not something shameful, and offers to sleep beside her. She suggests knocking before they start or even opening the door for her. Iefke replies that she must eventually manage it herself, while Dimitri argues that the group can help her now, just as it already makes room for Michiel’s slogan T-shirts, Dimitri’s crochet hooks, Beatrice’s complaints about the showers, and Emma’s typing. Linda’s offer is specific and usable: she is prepared to change what she does so that Iefke is not alone with the task.

Alopecia and working life

Emma’s first interpretation of Linda’s appearance is wrong. After seeing her hairlessness, she assumes that Linda has had chemotherapy. Linda laughs and explains that she has no cancer: she has alopecia. When she removes her cap, Emma sees remaining blond tufts across her scalp and the loss of her eyebrows. Linda explains that, after a year, the hair follicles shrink and the loss becomes permanent. Treatments have not worked, and doctors have advised her to address the problem at its root. When Emma asks about the cause, Linda identifies stress and, more specifically, work stress.

That work is not in the past. Linda corrects Emma’s assumption that she used to work at the fire service: she still does, as a professional commander. Emma then reinterprets the way Linda moves through the PAAZ, scanning spaces, taking charge of practical problems, and trying to settle disagreements with other patients. She notices that Linda tends to sit higher, keeps one leg raised, and faces the door. The scene links Linda’s organizing presence to the work she continues to do without reducing her illness to her occupation: the same professional competence that makes her attentive to surroundings exists alongside a condition that has resisted treatment and has made work stress a serious concern.

Attentiveness to other patients

Linda is alert to distress even when she is not the person speaking. After Beatrice leaves the group, Linda acknowledges that Beatrice has a strong effect on those around her. Emma says that she knows suicidal feelings but cannot understand Beatrice’s particular plan; Linda explains that Beatrice had told the group about it in therapy the day before, including telling her grandchildren. Linda’s response registers both the seriousness of Beatrice’s situation and the impact of disclosing it to family members. Her concern later becomes more direct: on the evening before leaving, she asks Emma and Iefke to look out for Beatrice because she is worried about her.

Linda also offers Emma a less accusatory way to understand Sergei’s reluctance to remove Emma’s stockpiled medication. Emma describes the delay and the difficulty of feeling that Sergei does not take her illness seriously. Linda suggests that his response might be self-protection: if he does not fully acknowledge how serious Emma’s problems have been, he does not have to face how close he might have come to losing her. She does not claim to know Sergei well, and presents the explanation as a possibility rather than a certainty. The suggestion gives Emma a way to consider his hesitation as fear, not simply indifference.

Her own experience of relationships is more ambivalent. Linda recounts a colleague who was hospitalized with depression after pregnancy and wanted her husband to visit every evening. He spent hours listening to her, while also working full time and caring for three young children, until he collapsed and his doctor restricted visits to once a week to protect him and the family. Linda has no partner herself. Being alone in hospital felt profoundly lonely, but also spared another person the burden of the PAAZ and her baldness. Seeing Emma and Sergei together makes her think she might want that kind of relationship, even as she acknowledges the cost that constant support can impose.

Departure and significance

Linda’s decision to leave begins with a conversation with her therapist. Although she had expected to stay until the ward found a solution, she considers the possibility that being there for her problems does not mean she will find their answers there. She plans to take leave from work and think about what she wants from her life. If stress is genuinely a risk factor, she concludes, remaining on the PAAZ may be the worst possible place for her. She does not say she must leave immediately; instead, she decides that taking her problems seriously may require a change of setting.

Her departure is also a moment of care for the group she is leaving. Emma remembers that Linda has been her fellow patient for three weeks and decides that the last evening should not pass as an ordinary, dispiriting night. As Emma leads Linda and Iefke upstairs, Linda says the plan seems cold and dull, then uses the opportunity to ask them to watch over Beatrice. The request shows the practical attention that has marked her time on the ward: even while deciding what conditions she needs for her own recovery, she remains attentive to someone else’s risk. Linda’s arc is not presented as a cure or a resolution of alopecia. It is a choice about where to address her difficulties, accompanied by a clear-eyed recognition that leaving the group does not erase her concern for the people in it.