Hospital highlights

There is nothing quite like a hospital stay. With almost four days of incarceration and a lot of heavy drugs, it's probably as close to an acid trip as this 40-something is likely to get in this day and age.

My nurses were, generally, a nice bunch if a little strange around the edges. Certainly the job of a nurse on a medical-oncology floor will make for some strange circumstances.

Medical-oncology is a floor where, of course, they put cancer patients. But they also put the Heinz 57 of whatever comes in the door and doesn't have another clearly-defined category of floor on which they belong. For example, there was one patient, the sex of which I could not determine, who, in a thick, Southernish accent, drawled "Help" every 7 or so seconds throughout the first 24 hours of my stay. Frankly, with the thick drawl, it could've been "hep" or "hemp" or any number of words, but I'm going with "help," since it seems to make the most sense.

That was absolutely the only word this patient could say. Seriously. His/ her discharge day was a happy one for me.

But I am jumping ahead. At one point at about 2 in the morning, this monosyllabic patient, whose wits were clearly no longer with him /her, got in trouble for grabbing or hitting a nurse. As tempers flared, the patient could only repeat the same syllable, only louder. Same intonation. Security was called, there was a lot of fuss, reports made, and still, the poor critter only intoned the word "help" over and over.

Then there was the gal who sounded like she was a cat trying to forcibly expel a hairball. For TWO FULL DAYS. Wraaaaah! Aaaach! Hhhha! quoth she, pretty much every five minutes. Probably could've timed my watch by her. Of course, being pretty heavily sedated, I was not nearly as bothered by any of this as you might expect.

Me, I was lucky. I had a sweet fluffy bird of a 71 year old roomie. She, accompanied by her courtly, polite, caring husband on their yearly snowbird visit to Florida and a cruise, had fallen ill and no one could figure out what ailed her. But despite her great discomfort, she was pleasant company and we told a lot of funny stories to pass the time. I hope she's doing well. She's a great little spitfire. We had a relationship partly of mutual envy; she envied my blood oxygen counts; I coveted her solid food. I actually miss her.

There were, of course, some pretty bad things that happened: one night, rather than take the time to move my IV which, since it had been put in the crook of my arm, got occluded ever time I fell asleep and bent it, a nurse sedated me into complete immobility. Never mind that I slept well. I think she gave me every pain pill and sedative in the box just to keep me still.

And then there is the fact that, since doctors often arrive for "rounds" at something like 6 am, nurses begin to prepare by prepping their patients around 4:30 a.m. This involves full noise and turning on of retina-scorching overhead lights. Neither my roomie nor I slept past 4:30 a single night we were there. Hospitals are NOT a great place to get a good night's sleep, let me tell you. Even when the nurses are not waking you at 4:30, nurses assistants (or at least mine) are occasionally giggly girls barely into their 20s who, true to their nature, are a puppyish bunch of happy, noisy creatures. Cute, but prone to causing quite a bit of noise on their progress through our rooms.

And did I mention there are vampires? Truly, there is a group of odd folks who, sometime around midnight, appear in your room and demand an arm for a blood sample. After my second or third day, I managed to fling up an arm for "taste-testing" without actually opening my eyes or even fully waking up. Not being needle-phobic is a good thing if you're going to be in a hospital.

In short, it was a deeply weird experience full of both funny and awful things. I'd have to say, on balance, I perhaps understand the state of mind of our prison population a little bit better this week than I would otherwise. You move from your normal, familiar identity suddenly and completely, into the patient-in-captivity and subject to the routines of others, completely dependent on strangers in a very profound way almost immediately. Your sense of self disappears quicker than you'd ever suspect.

Surreal doesn't even begin to cover it.