Happenings

I see the many things that happen here.

I see the ill, the old, the young, the paranoid, the parents, and the children.
This place is filled with people waiting. Constantly waiting.
Waiting to see a doctor, for their number to be called into the room.
Waiting for blood tests and graphs and pictures they don't understand.
Waiting for visitation hours, to see their loved ones lying in a miserable room with green floors.
Waiting for someone to wake up, not knowing if they ever will.

I skip most of the waiting. Wearing this seemingly magical badge with my name and the logo on it allows me to access the many locked rooms.

Into the doctors' offices.
The wards full of patients.
Sometimes, people even part way to let me through first.
Heck, I even get a discount buying food in this place.

I donated blood on Thursday. That was pretty fun. The needle used to draw blood out is much thicker than I thought it would be, and I freaked a little bit, not sure whether I should watch the needle poke into my skin or not. But it's not bad really, a little pinch in the crook of my elbow, and the blood flows out immediately. I showed a picture of my blood filling a little plastic pouch to my friends.
Me: Isn't blood dark?
Jason: I think your blood is just filled with poisonous toxins. Anyone who gets your blood will die.
Me: Thanks, asshole.

My friends here are lovely. I've missed them so.

Most days, I go around the wards with the doctor to see the patients. It's often depressing, but it's the most interesting part of the day. I think I just absorb sadness really well.

The first thing I notice, is that the old man was wearing oven mitts. And the oven mitts are tied to the rails on the side of the bed. And also, he does't have legs. He mumbles something, his eyes wild and darting around. He has diabetes, and had his legs amputated a while ago. He is being restrained, because he is confused. With oven mitts. He tugs, waving his mitted hands weakly.

The girl has a frown on her face, and the machine next to her shows that she has no heart beat. I didn't understand how everyone could be so calm, the nurses just shuffling along, doing nothing very much at all. Then I see that the machine isn't connected to her. She is being moved into the ICU today, because the lesion in her brain took a turn for the worse.
Her husband is sitting on a chair next to her, cupping her hand in his. They don't know if she's going to wake up again.

In the adjacent bed, lay a woman with a tube coming out of her throat. A large sack of urine is hanging on the bedside. Every breath she takes shakes the tube in her neck, and her body is tilted in an angle as if something sharp is under the right side of her back. She's been in a coma for two years.

The woman wouldn't look at me in the eye. Or rather, she couldn't look at me in the eye. She understands us, but she couldn't talk or move the way she wants to. The blanket is lifted up, and I see that she's wearing a diaper. She is wearing cute purple socks with kittens on each toe. Her toenails underneath are painted red with white hearts over them. She had a stroke, and the chances of her even partially recovering is slim, and a difficult road to endure.

A wheelchair rolls in, and the old lady sitting in it has her hat over her eyes. Her stance is withdrawn, and she doesn't look up. The doctor takes the lady's jacket off to measure her blood pressure, and she just sits there, half in her jacket. I stand up and help her slowly put her jacket back on. She tugs on it several times after I put it on her, not once looking at me. She suffered a stroke, and is depressed about not being able to recover.

The young boy rolls past me on the stretcher, wires and tubes all over. He had just had a heart operation, to mend the hole between his ventricles. A ventricular septal defect. They strip him when he entered the ICU, and I could see a giant, white gauze pad taped to his chest. He's only nine years old.

Today, I also met Nicol David's father. He is a jovial man, and didn't seem to mind the hospital's gloomy atmosphere. He smiles at me, and chats to the doctor as if they were old friends. He's the only happy patient that I've seen in a week.

I get ridiculously long lunch breaks, so I wander around the hospital after eating. I've been to the blood donation lab, and pestered them several times to take my blood, succeeding only on my third try. Lucky three. My blood pressure was too low for them the first two times. I've been to the top of the building to look at the view on the full length glass windows. I often go and look at the newborn babies in the nursery, their faces so small, wrapped in thick, warm blankets. Attached to the crib is a piece of paper, blue for boys, and pink for girls, indicating their name, blood type, and when they were born.

Overall, I've felt pretty emotionless here. The melancholy goes against the rare happy moments, which balances out. I find myself smiling at the patients a lot, but the smile doesn't quite reach my eyes. It's just an obligatory smile.