Hospital 2
Wednesday, January 5, 2011 at 8:16PM | by Otter 
In my father's hospital room, the window is like a television screen that shows a dull wall of other windows. You can stand there looking through them as though you were looking at scores of television screens.
To the left an African American nurse dutifully sponge-bathes an obese man with close-cropped hair and colorful tattoos. I cannot see his face, but he keeps pointing the television remote at the wall, out of habit since you don't have to point these wired wands at all. Mechanically, over and over, he points, ignoring her. She washes him, puts her supplies into a cart, and leaves without, it seems, saying a word.
In a nearer window, an old woman sits staring at a grey rainy sky. She rests her chin on the handles of a walker. Her room seems silent, no flicker of television. No motion. Just her eyes looking out, maybe like we seem to angels as we peer through the windows in the walls of our lives, dreaming of being in wider, spacious places that we can dimly remember.
Up a level I can just make out the disordered bookshelves of an office, a dead plant on the windowsill. A fluorescent light gutters and snaps on and off there.
Quite close in the corner nearest me there are balloons: "It's a Girl!" I can make out the letters. There is a steady light in that room. An athletic looking man with a large smile moves across the window, folding blankets. 
In all the rooms there is a sort of distance, as though these are not human lives, but characters whose habits and dispositions I can pigeonhole as easily as I can the bad guys in a film.
And I inhabit one, too. Dad is off having tests done. His bed is empty, rumpled.
They will cut out his gallbladder laproscopically, they think, and solve all sorts of problems. I remember just enough medieval medicine to be grateful for the progress of knowledge.
Making my way through the atrium on the way out last night, I saw women in wheelchairs with babies in their arms, and amputees, and people with diseases and narratives of all kinds, and an elderly woman in a hospital uniform, who was of resolute cheerfulness, greeting people, telling them welcome, and farewell, and wondering what she can do to help them find their way in this marketplace of sickness, death, and life.
Hospitals, Medicine in Personal Reflection 
Reader Comments (5)
Hope all goes well.
I have always hated hospitals. Their stark white walls, floors, and sheets showcasing how little man can really control. You enter in hushed tones, like there is a secret. The patient is void of human trappings; no makeup, jewelry, hairdo, fine clothes or fancy shoes. Laid bare to the fact that all that live must die. Visitors hold their breath unknowingly, waiting for news of if the threads have been cut, or are still intact. All are waiting to leave the eerie smells and robotic sounds.
I was pleasantly surprised at the hospital room my sister gave birth in. It didn't feel like a hospital room: The walls and the furnishings were wood, making it earthy and homey instead of the usual sterile, gross feelings hospitals give you. All in all, not a bad place for a kid to be born.
Also, she had gotten big so fast that I figured out that she was having twins. The reason the second kid didn't show up on the ultrasound was that it was a ninja. The room had only one door and no windows, so there was a possibility of her seeing a flash before the ninja kid was gone.
Victoria, yeah, neo-natal and birth rooms are pretty awesome these days in America. This is the golden age of childbirth.
As for the ninja... he can take part in a Ninja parade one day. Click here.
The hospital world can outwardly seem gross, unwelcoming, and just plain odd on somedays. I'm not sure how other healthcare workers feel, but on most days I see the beauty of both the suffering and wellness of the visitors.