In the evening the hospital waiting room is quiet, with just a few tired people scattered in chairs listlessly watching Wheel of Fortune while awaiting news about their loves ones. A wall monitor lists patients' code names alongside little icons indicating the stage of their surgeries: a scalpel when slicing begins, a row of sutures when he's being stitched up, a bandaid showing he's in recovery, or a big T telling us to contact the reception desk. Except there's no one manning the reception desk; the two staffers went around telling us all they were leaving for the evening before stepping through the sliding doors that WHOOSH as if the receptionists were leaving the bridge of the Starship Enterprise.
I wish I could WHOOSH out with them. My husband's procedure is minor and simple--removal of a large, squishy fluid-filled cyst near his armpit--but we've been at the hospital since 5 p.m. and they didn't get him into surgery until around 7. After a long day at work, the last thing I want to do is spend the evening hanging around a hospital waiting room.
Let's face it: I don't handle hospitals well. My husband's job as a pastor requires him to spend long hours with suffering people in all kinds of unpleasant places--hospitals, prisons, nursing homes--and he always knows how to bring cheer into the room, when to open the hymnal and sing, and when to shut up and pray. I, on the other hand, start to tense up the minute I enter the parking garage, and when I walk through the doors, my jaw clenches up and my wordhoard shuts down. Just to stay sane, I have to retreat to a safe place, like the middle of a book, and when I'm not reading I devote all my energy to getting out of the hospital as quickly as possible.
This is what I tried to do last night after my husband's surgery, but he was in no hurry to leave, even though he was experiencing some discomfort after having his armpit shaved, sliced, and sutured (with glue!), a process alternately painful and ticklish. I tried to hustle him out the door but he kept finding friends to talk to--a former student who's now a nurse and another wearing the uniform of a sheriff's deputy. The deputy had just finished a 12-hour shift guarding a jail inmate while she gave birth. Imagine spending 12 hours waiting for a person not related to you to give birth, keeping watch in case she dashes out the door between contractions dragging her IV pole behind her. All I'll say is: It's a good thing they don't let people like me carry a gun in a hospital waiting room--and yet this deputy was just as friendly and cheerful as if he'd spent the day at Disney World.
I envy this gift my husband has: the ability to be present and encouraging in the midst of the most difficult circumstances. All I had to do was sit in a comfortable chair for a few hours while he got sliced, but by the time we left, I had tensed up into a tiny, dense black hole of stress while he was chatting cheerfully with everyone he passed, without the benefit of mood-altering drugs. If hospitals handed out Valium to everyone in the waiting room, the world would be a mellower place. (But then who would drive the patients home?)
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