hospitality

                 The hospital. It’s so serious. Everyone there has the same blank smile, the one they hope masks their concern. Nobody says hello in the elevator and the mellow green walls designed to be calming, are not. You look at the ground when walking the halls because you don’t want to intrude on anyone’s privacy….or you’re afraid of what you’ll see.

                I’ve spent a lot of time in hospitals. I was six the first time. I had been sick for days; couldn’t really breathe. My mother rubbed Vicks Vapor rub on my chest and propped me up on a mountain of pillows to help me breathe. I coughed incessantly, a dry, tight cough that took all the energy out of me. It was dark out when my mother bundled me up for the drive to the hospital. We sat in the waiting room in hard plastic chairs lined up next to the windows. There were toys in the corner of the room and a pile of picture books but nobody was playing with them.

                Luckily, we didn’t have to wait long. I was so weak and cold but my mother insisted I take my jacket off; I just wanted to feel better. A doctor I didn’t know walked in the room with a bright smile on his face. Him and my mother spoke about me as if I wasn’t sitting in the room but I didn’t have the energy to explain how I was feeling myself. The doctor listened to me breathe, moving his stethoscope around on my back. His smile was gone and a slight frown was in its place. He told my mother he waas concerned about my high fever and the rattling her heard in my chest and would like to get some chest x rays.

                More waiting. For what, I didn’t know. I couldn’t rest. The bed’s lumpy mattress was uncomfortable and it was too high off the ground. I ached.  The lights were bright and too many people were walking by the room talking in hushed voices that weren’t quiet enough.

                Minutes, or hours, or minutes that felt like hours, went by before two men in blue scrubs arrived to take me to my x ray. Symbiotically, they locked the bars on each side of me and wheeled me out of the room. We winded down the corridors and I watched the dark green border whiz by me. The ride is the only thing I remember about my first x ray.

                I was admitted to the hospital with pneumonia. It was the first time I heard the word. I was allergic to the penicillin I was prescribed, complicating my recovery. But I did recover and went home with two inhalers and a new bracelet.

                When you spend a lot of time in hospitals you develop a liking for people-watching and you learn a lot about relationships. You see sick wives downplaying their pain to ease the worries of their husband. You wonder why, when life is at stake and everything is exposed, people are more dishonest than ever.

                In 1992 my grandmother was diagnosed with breast cancer. I was young, only seven and I wasn’t given many details about her illness. She was hospitalized often and I grew accustomed to seeing her in a hospital bed. I was too young to realize the severity of the situation, probably because of my grandmother’s impressive acting chops. Yes, she looked sick. She had tubes hooked up to her arms with clear liquid running through them and her eyes were sagging, her skin sallow. She had lost her hair. But she always smiled for me.  She stayed awake while I read to her and chattered about school. I laid with her in bed and we watched Days of Our Lives, her favorite soap opera. If she was scared, she never showed it. If she was angry, I didn’t know. Each week I painted her nails.

                When she had a double mastectomy she joked about it and showed off her new “ta ta’s.” Her good humor didn’t last long before she landed back in the hospital. This time it was lung cancer.

                Shocked. Another adjective that describes most people in hospitals. Whether you’re a patient or a visitor, you’re probably thinking “Why? How could this happen to me/someone I know? It’s not fair.” It’s never fair but people say it anyways, as if fairness ever factored into the bad genes or bad decisions that led the person to their hospital bed. As if saying it changes anything.

                My grandmother smoked for two years when she was twenty, before she got pregnant with my mother. She told me she gave it up easily, that she never really liked it anyways. Two years.

                She didn’t bounce back as quickly the second time. Her stays at the hospital were longer; she was home less. During the week my mother got out of work at five and we would get in the car and drive to Bangor to visit her in the hospital. We would say hi to the nurses congregated at the main desk. We didn’t need directions to her room and her doctor became a friend whom we all loved. He celebrated with us when she went into remission.

                Our happiness was short-lived, our enthusiasm premature. The dark winter was over and spring leaves covered the trees; flowers bloomed. My grandmother's spring allergies turned into a cold. Her immune system,weak from chemotherapy and radiation, was ravaged by the seemingly minor cold and it quickly escalated to pneumonia.  

                You always think you know what to worry about. You’re scared when somebody tells you they have cancer but shrug it off as a minor concern when someone gets admitted to the hospital for the flu. Most people think appendicitis is no big deal but what they don’t know is that your whole life can change in a day and it’s the things you least expect that will crush you.

                She was admitted to the ICU. Nurses and doctors in the ICU are the most empathetic of all hospital employees. They don’t bother with forced smiles. Instead, their eyes shine with pity and concern. Here, they don’t bother with lies. They don’t sugarcoat situations and they don’t bend the rules.

                I wasn’t allowed to visit her. I was underage. It killed me knowing that I could make her feel better. I wanted to tell her I knew it was going to be okay. I had had pneumonia only three years before and was completely fine.

                That was the last time we went to the hospital to see my grandmother. I was nine.

                I lost faith in medicine. Didn’t understand how someone could beat two forms of cancer and die from a simple virus like pneumonia. The only answer I had was that doctors didn’t know anything.

                Yet, I couldn’t avoid them. My asthma hadn’t gone away and the next winter I became a patient at the lovely Eastern Maine Medical Center when I developed pneumonia. I was petrified, too young to understand the factors that led to my grandmother’s death. I didn’t know about white blood cells and the immune system. I thought I was going to die.

                Every time I got sick there on out I was convinced it was a chronic illness. My knees ached and I was convinced I was arthritic. When I found bruises on my body I knew it was leukemia. Rashes were the worst for me.  A symptom of virtually everything, I would spend nights awake obsessing over what the rash (bug bite) meant. During my yearly physicals I would show my doctor freckles on my body that I had deemed cancerous only to find out they were just freckles.

                Since I knew I was being irrational, I spent a lot of time outside of the doctor’s office, convincing myself nothing was wrong with me. As a result, I avoided the doctor when I should have gone.

                I woke up early on a summer day in 2006, my stomach burning. I couldn’t stand up and cried out; it hurt so bad, I couldn’t help it. I spent the morning keeled over in the bathroom unable to move, the sharp pain stabbing my right side. I tried to drink water, do anything to make me feel better, but nothing worked. I laid back down in the fetal position, willing the pain to go away. Finally, at seven p.m. I couldn’t take it anymore. Terrified, I had my roommate drive me to the hospital where I waited three hours to be seen.

                This time I went into the examining room alone and as I chugged the fluorescent yellow liquid to prepare for my CT scan, I realized how lonely the place full of people really was. As I lay in the capsule, still as I could be, I prayed they would find something wrong with me. I needed an answer to the pain.

                I was preparing for surgery, the valium dripping into my veins. Quick. The surgery had to happen right away. This was pretty serious. So serious I had called my parents; they were in the waiting room. The nurse administering my drugs had a soothing voice and I wasn’t nervous anymore. Maybe it was the drugs or just relief to have the answer I had prayed for.

                My stay was short and sweet. I came out of surgery on schedule and my appendectomy was successfully. They sent me home with a prescription for vicoden and instructions to rest for at least a week.

                The hospital saves lives.  A scary place, you can justify avoiding it almost every single time. Not enough money, no insurance, the pain's not that bad. It’s probably nothing, let’s just wait it out. You’ve done it, I’ve done it. I almost did but something made me go. Fear, our most primitive symptom; it keeps us alive.