Blogatron

Project Dad #1: What I Learned at the Hospital

Note: I have been collecting or thinking or percolating various snippets about Project Dad since way back when all this began, several eons/nine weeks ago depending on your outlook and my mood. I keep waiting for them to formulate, but the lazy snippets will not materialize nor edit their lazy selves, and frankly putting them all in one place would just scare you and me both. So I am going to start releasing them into the wild, finished or coherent or not, because my brain is getting full and I need to put something up on this damn website once in a while, don’t I?

Back to What I Learned at the Hospital

If you are the same kind of morbidly narcissistic ass that I am, you have probably spent at least a little time envisioning one or more of the following scenarios: 1) Languishing under the spell of that’ll-show-them attractive, wasting illness, or heroically caring for loved one with same. 2) Waking up in the hospital after a gruesome accident of some sort, perhaps missing a limb or two, or heroically facing a future with loved one with same. 3) Receiving a diagnosis of some sort of movie-of-the-week terminal illness, or heroically breaking the news to loved one with same. All of these scenarios probably feature either a) the appearance of many friends, family members, and old elementary school nemeses, whom you amuse with your resilient humor, impress with your quiet bravery, or dispatch with scathing truths; or b) you, heroically keeping up the spirits of, promising to care for, and fetching warm blankets and reading materials for, your loved one.

This is all, of course, total bullshit. What happens is this: the person in need of care and the person wanting to care are both at the mercy of the hospital, a machine that tick tocks along at its own inexorable pace. This means that you will not get to do anything, except wait for things to happen or watch things happen. If you are the person in the hospital, you will be cranky, because you will probably hurt and you do not get dinner when you want it but when they bring it and because people keep waking you up to take your blood pressure so that you don’t up and die and leave your heirs to sue them. If you are the visitor, you can rush around all you want, fetching books and requesting another cup of coffee for room 629 and asking the nurse things like “That…should that be swollen like that?” but it won’t make a bit of difference. The hospital will just do its thing, and you can protest or go along, as you wish, but the same things are going to happen no matter what you do. The hospital will let you yell and scream and squawk, to an extent; if it keeps you busy the hospital doesn’t mind. The hospital is so confident that your little insignificant belief that you might be able to change things doesn't phase it; you actually amuse the hospital a little, to be honest. That’s the thing about the hospital: it always wins because no matter what you say, the hospital can come back with “Oh, yeah? Well I’m keeping people alive here,” and how can you beat that? You can’t. The hospital has the best reason ever for being totally dehumanizing.