Hospital

I've spent a lot of time throughout my life in hospitals - not because I was having troubles or personally needed to be in them, but because the people around me did. I've pretty much always just been a visitor, with the obvious exception of health check ups and the like. I've never experienced what it's like to be laying in the bed, hanging on to life. But I've watched it plenty of times. 

I understand that they're places of healing, and a lot of the time the fact that a person is in the bed and not in the ground is a very, very good thing. But that doesn't change the aura of sadness and coldness that pervades every floor. The feeling that, every time you walk the floors, walk past the different rooms, you might just witness someone's passing on. And that the one doing it might be the one you came to see.

Sometimes you'll come at night, and there's an eerie silence across the halls that only serves to amplify that feeling of walking into the land of the dead. The only sounds that remind you you're still alive are the slow and rythmic beeps of life support systems, machines running, and the quiet whispers of doctors talking about what to do with each patient. You wish that there was anything to make a little more noise, a little different noise. Then you come back in the morning, when there are more visitors and more doctors, and it's easier to overhear them talking about the failing conditions of patients, and you start to miss that eerie silence from the night before. 

And actually visiting doesn't really help. It would be one thing to visit someone with broken bones, but it's another thing entirely to visit someone on the brink of death. To see their bodies failing them, and to feel how weak they are, and to hear them barely be able to talk or breath. 

I've been visiting my mom today, who had a severe heart attack. Her lungs only barely managed not to fail her. I watched her, riddled with tubes, try to cough. Her body shook like she was having a seizure, the machines couldn't read her pulse, and for a good five seconds at a time as she repeatedly tried to cough, her breathing ceased entirely. Each time, I wondered if this was it. If this was the end. 

Taking her breathing tube out wasn't any better. The doctors assured us that she should be strong enough to breath without it, but it had also been well established that if she could not breath without it, my mother did not want it to be put back in. She was certain that she would rather die than go back onto that tube. And while I couldn't blame her, that put a real haze over the whole procedure. This was quite literally do or die. I was in the room, watching, half expecting my mother to die becore my very eyes. 

Fortunately, that was not the case. And accordingly, she's feeling much better. But that wasn't the end of the road. She's got a lot of recovery ahead of her, and if I know my mother, she's going to complain every step of the way. And it's a very real possibility that this will happen again. Soon, even. And she may not make it that time. 

But she did this time. And as much as I don't like being in them, and as much as my grandmother may think otherwise, we have hospitals to thank for that.