insomnia
Most frustrating part about insomnia is its complete idiocy. Like a fool I lay there, tossing and turning, boxing the feathers out of the pillow, counting the sheep, the cows and the rest of Noah’s arc. I blankly watch the fan blades turn and let my brain wonder through random thoughts. It did not help that last night I was helping Ira study for her exam and conversation changed to a hospital talk.
“Hospital is hospital you know and strangest things happen there” - she said. “Yesterday I was in the lab when a hospital worker came in and asked for the key to the morgue. He said he had a leg that needed to be placed there. I felt my own legs suddenly give away and slowly slid against the wall in the direction of my boss’s office. Alan, my boss, just sighed and got out the key”.
I kept listening strangely fascinated by this part of life that disgusts me. I could never work in a medical facility. There mere sigh of blood is sickening and unpleasantly surprises phlebotomists when I faint while they draw my blood for lab tests.
“Also” - she said, to continue the morbid subject “sometimes we are sent to the maternity floor to draw blood work and typically it is a happy place. You come in to the patient’s room a cheerfully ask the usual ‘how are you’ to start small talk and make them feel more comfortable. Except when there is a wooden leaf on a door… Then we do not ask about their business because mothers in there have lost their child. Some of those women are in such state of confusion that they do not even know about the passing yet.”
After short silence she continued - “Another day I walked into a room where patient had to have her leg amputated. She had advance gangrene and needed the surgery.” I could not believe it! Advanced gangrene at this age and in this country! Ira just nodded… “Yes. I took her blood and she asked the nurse in the room if she still has her knee. She did”.
The imaginary faces of those patients along with other dark thoughts were clouding my spotless sheets, ceiling, everything around. Last time the clock showed 5:30am. An hour later I woke up with heavy head and pulsing eyes. Was I dreaming? Or was I dreaming about dreaming?