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My Profile
Gift from Hil Part 2 - 2014-12-30
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2:00 p.m. - 2011-10-06
I loathe going to the hospital as a visitor. Loathe. First of all hospital visits are always about the visitor's guilt and never truly about the visit-ee. Because if they were really about the sick person then nobody would go unless specifically invited. And the sick person could watch trash TV, nap, feel cruddy and get on with the serious business of getting well without the onus of having to be fricken entertaining on top of it. "Oh, me? Well this skull fracture isn't too bad. But enough about me, what's going on with you, Person Who Hasn't Called in 6 Months But Feels Compelled To Visit Me When I Feel Like Shit and Am Wearing a Gaping Hospital Gown?" What the hell? Go away! I'm in the hospital for Pete's sake! This means I have bad things wrong with my body. You want to do a mercy visit? Then take me out for a beer when my spirit is under the weather. That's when I could use some distraction and cheering up. Abdominal surgery I'm fine all on my own, thanks. But the blues? Come over with cheesecake and a Meg Ryan movie. Another thing about hospitals is the woe. The pain, the anxiety, the fear, a hospital is just a huge box of woe. I hear this drumbeat of misery. I feel it coming in through my pores. Makes my fillings ache. The sadness has a taste- bitter and dusty. No wonder the babies shriek when they're born, hospitals make me want to shriek too. Yet that's where I was this morning. FIL had a mini-stroke last night. Apparently this wasn't the first. It was just the first one to have such drastic symptoms. His vision went black. He was woozy and couldn't see and was very frightened. MIL took him to the ER. By the time he was seen and admitted his sight had come back and he wasn't feeling quite as horrible but they kept him, of course. Today they're doing tests. Ultrasound, another CATscan, already emptied him of several phials of blood. Seemed pretty chipper when we got there this morning though. FIL likes the hospital. I think the attention and the novelty chirk him up far more than any medicines. He was more on the ball today than I'd seen him in a long time. Mick says his dad has always been very casual about his illnesses and hospitalizations. There've been many. FIL was definitely less upset than Mick is. My poor mannie is wigged out. I can't tell you how badly I want this cycle of yuck to end. I know it will. To everything there is a season. Been around long enough (I'll be 49 in Jan, btw) to know it's not always grubby and terrible. Every life gets some slack. It's just our family and its possessions are in that time. The cars and appliances are X years old and apt to wear out and break down right about now. We are not the only ones having money troubles, that's for sure. Mick's folks are older. Not old old, but old enough that good health is no longer a given. They, like our cars, have reached a certain age and mileage. But unlike cars, people have no cost to value ratio that can be measured in dollars. A car you can decide is or is not worth the investment of a big pricey repair vs the cost of a new(er) car with fewer health issues. Not people. People are fixed and fixed and fixed long, long after their warrantees are expired. And the repeated intrusions with stents and pacemakers and hips and steel rods into a body that clearly is tired and would like to just quietly fall apart on its own seem almost cruel. And done, like those guilty hospital visits, more for the benefit of the doers than the patients. Oy. Another thing. Another sad, difficult thing.
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