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Am I on time with this? I scarcely know any more. Things keep jumping up and hitting me in the backside and throwing me off my schedule and there’s nothing I can do about it. This time, would you believe, it was the hospital again. I’m not an invalid, it’s just that I seem to spend time in hospitals a lot. And it’s not because I just happen to have a couple of them located right across the street from me.
This time was a little different. I went to the place immediately opposite my house but I found a condition there that I had been kind of expecting since the day before, which was Christmas. It was Black Tuesday. You know, like Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving when the whole country goes shopping at once? Hearing some Christmas conversations, I had concluded that the day after was going to be the medical equivalent. No one was going to spoil their Christmas holiday for a little thing like an infectious disease or a crippling injury, but the day after was going to be the day they descended en masse on the doctors and the hospitals demanding immediate attention to their “emergencies.” I arrived at the emergency room to find it jammed with all those opportunists getting in the way of legitimate cases like myself who hadn’t been waiting things out through Christmas but had been suddenly stricken the day after without previous notice. What a sell! as the Brits say.
I found my self being squeezed right out of the door of the emergency room, packed to the rafters with sufferers -- probably all hypochondriacs, really, if you ask me -- until rescued by my doctor, who shipped me over to the neighbor hospital where the fire sale was a little less intense and I was assigned a bed by 11:00. But please, readers, take a lesson from me; don’t get sick at Christmas. There is no room at the inn.
On Wednesday I settled down for a normal hospital stay, to be concluded or continued after the tests were run and the results analyzed. Nothing unusual there. However I found that a new element has now entered into the hospital atmosphere with which most of us are acquainted. This is the coming of the “hospital howl” which now is to be heard ringing through the halls much like Cole Porter’s beat-beat-beat of the tomtoms when the jungle shadows fall. It wasn’t a bit like the tick-tick-tock of the stately clock as it stands against the wall.
My second night, when I was in a normal state of alertness again, I first heard it, an ungodly shriek turning to a bellow that could have come from King Kong. Could I have finally landed in the psycho ward, I asked myself? Has it come to that? And who was this banshee shattering the midnight air with his hellish outburst? I went to the nursing station to find out. Nobody there seemed very worried about it. Call hospital security? For a removal to the psycho ward? Oh, we can’t do that. He’s a patient, you see. Yeah, but so am I, and I came to the hospital for my health and this isn’t conducive to health, it’s the opposite.
They continued to explain that the hog-caller was not really an extraordinary type of patient. In fact he wasn’t the only noisemaker on the floor. If I changed my room, I’d only run into the other one. What we’ve done, they said, is give this man an injection which would soon shut him up and let everyone go back to sleep. In the meantime, better get used to it. He’s suffering from dementia, which comes often in old age and will increase as the number of seniors continues to grow. The hospitals simply can’t treat all these people as psychiatric cases and just have to put up with them. So go back to your room and this time shut the door and get yourself some sleep.
Good advice, I guess, except that the only miracle that came out of the miracle drug they gave the disturber of the peace was an increase in his uproar, to which music I finally fell asleep in the dawn. Not that I ever figured out what tune he was playing. For the most part he was totally unintelligible except when he began a new aria with Hey! progressing from there to Hey!! and then up the scale to Hey!!! after that descending into gibberish. If he had a message for the world it passed by me.
I got my first look at this wonder man the next day. I was expecting something on the order of Freddy Krueger, but in fact he was a totally insignificant old dwarf looking like Santa Claus without the beard. Where he got the Bull of Bashan voice I don’t know, but I could picture him as a ring announcer telling the crowd “In this corner weighing 220 pounds we have Mohammed Al-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e!!!” I gave him a dirty look which didn’t bother him at all.
And so it continued by night and by day. I got used to it. So did the other victims. Once in a while I’d run into another male patient during the ululating and we’d shake our heads and roll our eyes at each other. Most of the females seemed to be very small and old and absorbed in their own thoughts, so I didn’t see much reaction from them. They were past caring, I suppose. I went through three roommates in four days, but only one of them was conscious enough to resent the reign of terror. I actually thought he might march out to the nursing station himself, but he had had a hip replacement, which ruled that out.
Hospitals have changed. As I’ve said, I’ve probably spent more time in them than most men my age. About eight or ten stays in fact. They were all necessary, they weren’t all short, but thankfully none of them have been for anything life-threatening, in case you’re picturing me as a basket case barely clinging to life. My first visit was in the Forties when I had an emergency appendectomy at Fordham Hospital in the Bronx, which has been since torn down. It was a coming-of-age experience, the kind of thing they make movies about now. I was becoming aware of the existence of another division of the human race, females, whom I thought I might like to become better acquainted with. As represented by the nurses looking after me, it seemed like something I should look into when I was restored to health. This turned out to be a correct anticipation, but I owe my first intimation of it to the Fordham gals with their white uniforms and their hair held in by snoods and the kids’ books and the breakfast rolls and the kind words they distributed to their lucky patients. I wish I could say I still liked hospitals as much as I did then, but in those days no one got hooked up to an IV feed or a heart monitor, so freedom rang. When I go to one now I know I’m going to jail for a while. I can live with that, but does my experience mean that every hospital existing is now a little Bellevue? | |