(no subject)
I hate hospitals.
I can remember a time when I liked them, at age 4 or 5. My grandmother worked in Nashville as an ER nurse, and all the nurses there would dote upon me and feed me tasty things. One male nurse, I recall, always teased me about drinking my chocolate milk, but always seemed to have some for me. Nice guy.
Now, though, I can't help but look upon them with a feeling of dread. I always get a tightness in my chest right before I go in, and then a sort of calm once I'm inside. It's like my subconscious is sure that the worst has already happened, and I might as well get the hard part over with. Even when it's ok, whoever I'm going to see has been or is being healed and I have good news to impart in the inevitable phone calls afterwards, they still scare the shit out of me. I try not to look at them when I drive by.
I guess I have good reason to. Nearly every time I've gone to a hospital in the past eight years it's been because something terrible has happened or something terrible happens while I'm there, and about half of my environmental associations with those events have been hospitals. I could probably draw the layout of St. Vincents in Santa Fe now, and none of the fairly decent amount of time I've spent there has been pleasant. Some of it was pretty appalling, actually. Like I said, I don't really like to think about it.
This does all have a point, I swear. Today I received a call from my friend Ben. Apparently he was in a car accident in Santa Fe on Saturday; some bitch in an SUV ran a red light. He broke his neck, though it was C2 (apparently a good place to break, if you're going to) and there's no nerve damage (or so the doctors think now. See? I don't like doctors either, I'm always paranoid it's really much worse than they're telling me. Because, damnit, most of the time it has been). Still, he's in a lot of pain, can't really move around much, and was so grateful for the hour and a half I visited him for that it damn near made me cry. He's pretty lonely, I guess. I intend to spend as much time with him as possible in the next couple days, and see if I can't free up the cash to go to Santa Fe and spend a few afternoons with him while he recovers (a process of two or three months). So, good and bad, and in this case the hospital did the good.
I still fucking hate hospitals.
I can remember a time when I liked them, at age 4 or 5. My grandmother worked in Nashville as an ER nurse, and all the nurses there would dote upon me and feed me tasty things. One male nurse, I recall, always teased me about drinking my chocolate milk, but always seemed to have some for me. Nice guy.
Now, though, I can't help but look upon them with a feeling of dread. I always get a tightness in my chest right before I go in, and then a sort of calm once I'm inside. It's like my subconscious is sure that the worst has already happened, and I might as well get the hard part over with. Even when it's ok, whoever I'm going to see has been or is being healed and I have good news to impart in the inevitable phone calls afterwards, they still scare the shit out of me. I try not to look at them when I drive by.
I guess I have good reason to. Nearly every time I've gone to a hospital in the past eight years it's been because something terrible has happened or something terrible happens while I'm there, and about half of my environmental associations with those events have been hospitals. I could probably draw the layout of St. Vincents in Santa Fe now, and none of the fairly decent amount of time I've spent there has been pleasant. Some of it was pretty appalling, actually. Like I said, I don't really like to think about it.
This does all have a point, I swear. Today I received a call from my friend Ben. Apparently he was in a car accident in Santa Fe on Saturday; some bitch in an SUV ran a red light. He broke his neck, though it was C2 (apparently a good place to break, if you're going to) and there's no nerve damage (or so the doctors think now. See? I don't like doctors either, I'm always paranoid it's really much worse than they're telling me. Because, damnit, most of the time it has been). Still, he's in a lot of pain, can't really move around much, and was so grateful for the hour and a half I visited him for that it damn near made me cry. He's pretty lonely, I guess. I intend to spend as much time with him as possible in the next couple days, and see if I can't free up the cash to go to Santa Fe and spend a few afternoons with him while he recovers (a process of two or three months). So, good and bad, and in this case the hospital did the good.
I still fucking hate hospitals.