Friday, September 29, 2006
Visiting the Hospital
I pick up the phone and immediately know it’s a call from the hospital. There’s a subdued background rustle of busyness, of nurses pulling charts, checking meds, broken by the spacey, electronic “bink . . . bink” of the patient monitors at the nursing station.
Three weeks ago, my friend was rushed to hospital in an ambulance. Her home help came in one morning to find her unconscious on the living room floor. Since then, I’ve been spending a lot of time in the hospital, both as a friend, and as one patient’s legally designated heath care representative. It has been an education.
As the doctor updates me on the night’s news, I take notes to pass on to other friends later. The doctor translates the meaning of the peaks and valleys traced on the patient monitor into the human language of good and bad nights. “Heart rate, temperature, blood pressure all look ok. Yes, yes, she did sleep some. Hmm?” I hear leafing through the chart. “N’uh, no, we didn’t need to sedate her again.”
In modern life, there is the world of the sick and the world of the well. At least for the rich, things are so arranged today that these worlds don’t overlap too much or for too long. If you get sick, you go see a doctor and then you’re well again. If you get really sick, you go into hospital. If you get old, you go into a nursing home.
The sick and elderly and the dying are kept apart, segregated from the workaday world where rude good health and perennial youth are simply assumed. Working life is ordered as if none of us needs to take care of an elderly relative or ailing child—or even ourselves. We live by the fiction that illness and age are what happens to other people, elsewhere. Somebody else will take care of it.
When you become that somebody else, you learn the rules of a different reality, visiting the world of the sick. Time there passes at a different rate. In a hospital, there’s a lot of waiting: waiting for the doctor, the test results, waiting to see if the latest meds help. In beige lobbies and outside rooms with discreetly-drawn curtains, you’re suspended in a queasy limbo, like an airport waiting room after a cancelled flight.
The rules of etiquette are different in the world of the sick. Bodily sickness and its medical management breach all everyday taboos about boundaries: about public and private, outside and inside, about what can be spoken and the un-nameable. Preserving a patient’s dignity as she sweats in a hospital gown designed for easy access, not modesty, demands a delicate conspiracy of averted eyes and unacknowledged tuckings-in. My sick friend and I take refuge in the cool Latinate language of clinicians, to avoid naming mortal terror and scalding pain. Neither of us speaks about the bags of fluid passing into and out of her body or the needle in her arm.
With these sombre thoughts, I have also carried home brighter lessons. I have witnessed the extraordinary resilience of the human personality: Even at her very sickest, my friend’s wry sense of humour sparked out from the word-rubble of her delirium. I have seen, too, the amazing capacity of the body to heal, aided by modern drugs and technology. My friend has just been discharged to a nursing home.
Returning each day from visiting, it’s been a relief to plunge back into humdrum concerns. Goldfinches swing on purple asters by the fence in my yard, colleagues are still fretting over budget lines and policies, and the paper says more bad movies are coming to town . . . .
Watching the goldfinches, I consider the workaday assumption that everyone must be youthful and healthy forever. It’s a myth: Each one of us will move between the worlds of the sick and of the well many times, whether carried there by sickness of our own, or whether we choose to go visit a sick friend. Turning away from the window, I pick up the phone to update my friend’s other friends on how she’s doing, and start calling.
For Michiana Chronicles, with thanks to the staff on the ninth floor at Memorial Hospital, this is Louise Collins.