Thursday, December 22, 2011

In the normal course of a year, I make it a point to avoid circumstances that might put me near or in a hospital, a policy which has served me well so far. But on Monday, buoyed by some vestigial notion of being a good brother, I accompanied my sister to her tonsillectomy, making sure to take detailed mental notes along the way. It was an early start to the day, the unwelcome din of the alarm sounding at an ungodly hour, and what I divined through the haze, roughly 30 minutes later, was how primal the hospital feels.

Let me explain. I’m not referring to the technology, obviously, because that was present in spades. It was more the frame of mind needed to function in this environment. There wasn’t any latitude for social niceties–only a desire to make it to the next milestone, the next dotted line to sign, the next time staff calls your name. I had set up shop at a round table and fired up my laptop, when an old dude rolled up in my peripheral vision, stood there for a few seconds, and then remarked, “You like that stuff, huh?” He meant well enough, and I knew the question was a conversation starter designed to highlight the generational divide, an implicit admission that all this newfangled technology was simply mind-boggling.

“Yeah, just a ton of work,” I exclaimed with a sigh. “So nope,” I continued with a chuckle, “I don’t really like the stuff.” He acknowledged the importance of work, seemed almost apologetic, and shuffled away. I felt like a douche, because in truth, I was just checking my personal e-mail and browsing the Battlelog to see what had transpired in Battlefield 3 the night before. But the fact of the matter was I didn’t want to connect, didn’t want to swap life stories and discuss what kind of surgery his wife needed. Me and mine–that was the mandate of the moment.

This insularity carried straight into the recovery ward, a sight in and of itself. It was a meat carousel, with groggy patients being swapped out like light bulbs, who all frankly looked like shit. It was a strange juxtaposition of suffering and sterility, set against a chorus of beeping heart monitors. There, too, I wasn’t in the best of moods. After watching the nurse incompetently futz around with the IV drip, then ask me to fetch two alcohol wipes for her, she started to prattle on about cookies she had brought to work. I wanted to shake her, tell her to shut the fuck up and get back to work. But instead I went through the motions, marshaled the few shreds of social decorum I had left at that hour, and affected interest, approximately 6 CCs worth.