Shock Treatment

A couple of years ago, Bob’s father had a heart attack and was given a 10% chance of surviving the night it happened. Against all odds, two years later, he’s still alive (which just goes to show what doctors know. Of course, they didn’t know the sort of fighter they had on their hands). This week, he’s developed some complications and is back in the hospital. We fully expect him to be home soon, but in the meantime, I’ve been spending an awful lot of time at the hospital, and we’ve been living at my father-in-law’s house with my brother-in-law who lives here fulltime (my mother-in-law, sadly, died before I ever had the pleasure of meeting her).

The things you find out about yourself when plucked from your normal environs and plopped down in unfamiliar territory are often quite shocking. The way things are going this week, I’m feeling like a patient in a 1950s asylum where ECT is all the rage. I’m surprised my hair isn’t standing on end.

The worst thing I’ve discovered about myself is that I’m a horrible person who harbors an out-of-control morbid curiosity. When we were hanging out in the ER Friday night, waiting for a room in the cardiac unit, I found myself far more interested in what was going on in all the other little rooms around us than in our own. One woman was moaning and yelling at all the assistants and nurses who tried to help her, claiming that all anyone wanted to do was hurt her, while someone I suspected might be a son was hovering around in a very embarrassed manner. Eventually, some policemen came along to question her. The police were involved? How dare they shut the curtains around her and speak in low tones, so I couldn’t hear what they were saying? I was just dying to know what the story was there (had someone broken into her house and beaten her? Was she a psychotic who’d refused to take her medication and had hurt someone herself?), but it seems no one else was interested in my enlightenment.

Then there was the young woman being wheeled down the hall in a wheelchair by two EMTs. She was weeping uncontrollably. I was trying to keep up with them to figure out what was going on, as I could only see her from behind (was she hurt? Was she just in a wheelchair because she was so distraught she couldn’t stand on her own? Had she been involved in some sort of accident in which she’d survived but had lost a loved one?), but they were moving as if they were about to win some sort of wheelchair marathon.

Saturday morning, I found my father-in-law in his room with a roommate. The gentleman was very sweet and informed me he was ninety years old and that his wife had passed away last March at the age of 89. They’d been married for 55 years. That was all fine and great, and I responded as politely and kindly as I could, but it wasn’t what I wanted to know. I wanted to know why he was there. Had he had a heart attack? Was he just there for tests like my father-in-law? I also wanted to know who the person was who kept calling obviously to say she loved him but who never seemed to visit. And I wanted to know why his great nephew was the one who lived with him and took care of him.

Finally, there’s the Halloween factor. I’ve been reading a lot about ghosts lately. Yesterday afternoon, I found myself sitting next to my father-in-law, watching him sleep, and wondering how many people have died in this room, which led me to think about hospitals and ghosts. Seems to me that if ghosts exist, hospitals must be full of them. Yet, I can’t recall any ghosts showing up in hospitals in any popular stories from the genre. I’m dying to ask the nurses if there are any stories of any hauntings in the hospital (which is just the sort of information someone with my imagination needs while hanging out in a room all alone with a man who’s spending most of his time sleeping, and when he's not, has strict instructions not to walk around too much) .

So this is what I become when I’m living away from home and making frequent visits to the hospital. Basically, I’m no better than all the rubber-necking ambulance-chasers I tend to mock when I’m busily going about my life on my own familiar turf. Well, at least I’ve learned a few things, not the least of which is that I’d better stay away from cemeteries.