Hospital Time, Again.

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Hospital time isn't real time. It flows at a pace you never master. When waiting with someone, it can be hard to understand that the patient's measure of it is different than yours. When the patient is your child, it's maddening. On the one hand, it is a marvel of modern society that a random person can manifest the symptoms of the weirdest deformity on a Saturday night and in just over 13 hours be under the knife to do something that will make it less bad. (Making anything “all better” is impossible since it depends on the mindless, life-long determination of the patient, and none of us are built for that.)

So I sit in the last hospital my brother and mother ever saw. The one my dad's had a knee replaced. My other brother had kidney stones remedied here. No, wait, here they weren't remedied, it took another hospital. This is the place that repaired my then-girlfriend's shattered elbow. I hate this place, I want to burn my clothes when I leave; not when I get home, when I walk out the door, walk naked to my car. But I recognize to my core that this—the helping of one to endure this “care”—is our 2nd highest calling. The first is to help our fellow human to die with as much comfort as possible at the time of their choosing. (No craziness here, we need to make education on that choice a top social priority.)

To boot, there are lousy food choices on a Sunday here. I mean, lousier than McDonald's, they've closed to be replaced by an ever-so-much-less-undesirable-PR vendor. (I have to admit, as my bro was dying from colon cancer here, the irony of the McD's was palpable.) So tired cranky and hungry. Perfect. Ok, I'm going to commandeer this couch and try for a nap. It'll make me run on hospital time for a while.

Edit: That surgery, a quickish fix, leads to over a year later undoing the temporary fix.  The hard way.  A surgery I think I had at 21 after the first try at 17 didn’t work.  All because the doctors never once mentioned that diet plays a rather large role in the health of your digestive system.  You’d think that even in the late 70’s, someone might know that.  Oh, wait, they did: they told me to drop dairy products.  Which turns out to be utter bullshit and was known as such even back then.  Be careful of single-sourced advice.

And since this post originally aired, I’ve been back to a buncha hospitals including my dad getting his knee replaced a second time. It took him 3 years of saying “Hey, there’s something wrong here” before they got to the threshold of “Well, ok, we’ll take another $20-50k off your hands and try again.”

And at every occasion, as I walk into whatever windowless waiting area with fish tanks, I think about how time has suddenly changed speed.