Hospital Air

Getting up at 5:30am is my favorite thing. We all got up early to take my mom to the hospital for her replacement hip surgery. When it comes to getting things done that have to be done, I tend to be practical and not prone to sentimentality. While trying to be a supportive person for my mom and providing a sense of both security and confidence I spent almost no time thinking about the scarier outcomes that are always possible when one human being cuts another one up with a knife to rearrange or replace parts. My mom was certainly thinking these thoughts. My job was to concentrate on the probable outcome which is a new lease on life.

While my mom was getting this major surgery done on her body I went to the Promotions Committee for the Downtown Association because I am a committee member.



I know, it's a pretty grown up activity for me to be involved in. (Does this mean I have to start wearing single breasted sensible navy colored suits with high heels, a brief case, and really boring hair?)

I am not going to talk about that meeting right now. Because I have other things on my mind. After the meeting Philip drove me back to the hospital to wait for my mom to get out of surgery.

I had at least an hour to wait. This is when I finally had the opportunity to give some deep and concentrated thought about what it means to get surgery. What it means to be in the hospital. Yes, it was quiet in there with only the incredibly disturbing low whine of the blustering wind coming through the vents, or the walls, or something. I could hear it everywhere. It was a the kind of low insistent creepy sound that makes you want to tear your own ears off just to get away from it. I would have been beside myself with exaltation if they had pumped some Britney Spears into the waiting room. Because that wind got into my head and is still there. Like the whole entire world has suddenly drained of life.

This is the kind of situation I love. There's nothing better than realizing how insane a place a hospital is while loafing around in one. Realizing how many lives begin and end in that one building. How many bones are set, or bolted up with titanium. It's incredible to realize what technology has allowed doctors to do for the human body. I am grateful and simultaneously bothered by this realization. A part of me feels that all this interference has upset the balance of nature in a negative way. But it cannot be denied that I have been extremely happy to benefit from modern science.

Humans weren't really meant to be opened up. It shakes me up profoundly that there are millions of humans who know how to remove spleens, stitch up holes that we can't see, and remove a beating heart and exchange it for another. I couldn't help but conclude that doctors and nurses deserve the high salaries they get and that health insurance companies are running a criminal business and aren't doing a damn thing to earn any of our money. They push paper around quite importantly but I'm pretty good at pushing paper too, so who needs them? Something tremendous is lost now that the health insurance industry stands squarely between the patient and the doctor.

I looked at my mom's surgeon and realized that this man, with whatever human foibles he carries with him, is going to see inside my mother's body. I looked at him not as an institutional worker bee, but as a human being who has the capability of putting broken people back together again. It's weird to look at a doctor's eyes and try to imagine what they see every single day. To look at them and realize that you are pinning all your hopes on that person's eyes being sharp, being able to see the unseeable. To look at human hands and know what intricate incisions they are capable of making, what art they perform on bodies every day is humbling to me, who can't even make a radish rose with a paring knife.

It's too easy to see doctors as miracle workers or as evil over-paid automatons. I don't see them that way. They are neither saints nor blood sucking bureaucrats. I can understand why people sue doctors for negligent care. For mistakes that were completely avoidable. But as I watched doctors and nurses coming and going I realized what an enormous burden we all place on them with our expectation that they never make a single mistake. Which isn't possible. Because they are human beings. I suddenly felt so tired for them all.

I couldn't work in a hospital. For many obvious reasons, one of them being my intense desire to stay as far away from medical school as possible. But especially because the air in them is untenable. Especially in the McMinnville hospital where there is a pervasive smell like a synthetic dried up honeycomb. Old honeycomb. A cloying smell that lingers in your nostrils long after you've gulped in lungfuls of the comparatively fresh air of the parking lot outside. What the hell is it? I'd rather smell disinfectant any day.

Not that I like that either.

My mom's surgery went really well. She can't feel anything yet except a tremendous discomfort in her neck from having to keep it in the same awkward position for two and a half hours. She's pretty grumpy about her neck. She also told me she wasn't happy to have been able to periodically hear the saws buzzing through her bone and having to be conscious of the smell of this operation. Ugh. I know that smell from getting a root canal or two.* She said that as she came in and out of consciousness she could hear the doctors and nurses chatting and caught a little something about Sedona so she let them know that she used to live there.

Chit chat over bone sawing. It kind of amuses me. It kind of makes me think of a slightly less violent version of Pulp Fiction.

My mom has quite a few weeks of painful recovery ahead of her now. But the worst is over because in a few weeks she's going to be able to walk without pain for the first time in over a year and a half. I am deeply relived for her sake.



*Two, to be exact with the certainty that many more will be enjoyed in the future.