home sweet hospital

When I was a kid I had a super-cheesy plaque in my room with the super-cheesy proverb "home is where the heart is."

But I find the proverb increasingly less cheesy, as the hospital starts to feel like home. I return to it late at night, its signage familiar and welcoming, its sounds and procedures reassuring. I wasn't able to sleep at a friend's house, and last night at our house I just felt edgy and sad, but here on the fold-up bed next to Loopy, I feel at peace and ready for rest.

There's something else I like about it: the hospital is utterly devoid of the world's usual pretense that "everything is okay" and if you just ________ it will all turn out all right (fill in the blank with the appropriate cultural, religious, familial or advertising-slogan admonitions). You can see in almost every face you pass--the profound awareness of the randomness of life, the pain and confusion of being human, and the total lack of control that we have over some of the things that affect us most. This awareness has a million flavors--resignation, determination, bewilderment, bitterness, etc. But when you see it over and over the core of it sort of distills out....

On a more prosaic note, neuro is a stranger unit that cardiac. Next door is an older (but not elderly) man who seems to have regressed to near-infancy. He spends his time sorting colored blocks and piteously protesting any attempt to feed him, take his temperature, etc. Loopy's nurse remarked today that Loopy is an unusual patient for the neurosciences unit. "She walks, she talks, she doesn't play with her poop..." Another reminder that it could be a whole lot worse.