#hospitaltime

[papers4teachers]

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New design 🌹 #planners #hospital #hospital_friends #hospitaltime https://www.instagram.com/p/CdDhycbDZcu/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[brianakenoh]

#funnylady #hospitaltime #ITP #arthandler #artinstaller this use one of the biggest reason why I hate getting sick! @mamasypapas I know your feeling better just sucks seeing you here..

[herrizious]

13.02.2017 Alhamdulilah .. meskipun penulisan nama kurang "R" tak apa lah yang penting sudah terangkat .. Alhamdulilah 😇🙏🏻 . . . . #surgery #surgerytime #surgeryteam #surgerynurse #surgerydone #hospital #hospitaltime #soepraoen (at Rumah Sakit Tentara Soepraon Malang)

[borderline-bitchbug-blog]

I give up, I'm done .. I've tried and tried but no one else wants to help me ... My family my doctors ... I think its time for a hospitalization

[luckyfibers-blog]

Hospital Time

When you think of being at a hospital, what’s the first thing that comes to mind?

What’s your first physical response?

What smells start to creep up your mental nostrils?

How many beeping machines do you hear in the back of your mind, and how many shades of white and beige and gray appear behind your eyes?

In one word, how would you characterize the time you’ve spent in or beside a hospital bed?

Once upon a time…

Since a car accident laid me up for months as a child, a litany of illnesses and injuries within my inner circle has kept me checked in at hospitals regularly. In fact, as recently as this morning, I was looking over my knitting to smile at RNs and PAs and CNAs and OTs, PTs, and RTs as they checked my friend from end to end before sending her home to mend from yesterday’s surgery.

By the age of ten, I was intimately aware of things like traction and body casts, but I was also familiar with the looks of a Legionnaire’s disease fever and the aftermath of surgical complications related to meningioma. I spent incalculable hours at the side of my sister’s bed through surgeries and recoveries that spanned nearly all of our formative years. I made so many trips to Mount Sinai to visit her and our mother during my early twenties that my friends started calling me Moses.

By twenty-one, I had slept in an emergency room crib next to the bed of an overdosed friend, and in a small, secluded room in the NICU, I held my stillborn nephew while a nurse took photographs.

By thirty, I had taken dozens of trains and buses and taxicabs to bring dozens of midnight pork buns from Chinatown to my pregnant, bedridden sister. I had worked out a dozen-song medley of Beatles tunes and had sung it to her a dozen times a night until she dozed.

I eventually got to change the tiny diapers of my newborn preemie nieces, but I also had to watch my precious friend waste away from AIDS and hepatitis.

I snuggled my mom during her chemo treatments, and I slept beside her for the last six nights of her life. I watched cancer erode my father’s body and brain mets devour his intellect, and then I watched him get buried next to my mother.

When called upon, I sit vigil for dying strangers, and as if this all weren’t enough to make me sick, my clumsy friends have given me plenty of opportunities to sharpen my gallows humor.

In a Word

We’re so afraid of the myriad things that can go wrong in the hospital–so worried about unknowns, so furious about the cost, so focused on the outcomes we are counting on–that the healing and care fail to factor into our IV-dripping, catheterizing, Kleenex-clutching impressions of hospitals. We take for granted the expertise, the technology, the research, the progress, and the virtual human army working behind every scene. Few of these triumphs filter through the fear, frustration, self-absorption, and boredom.

We look at our loved ones gathered around the beds and feel each other’s presence, but we tend to overlook the sublime honesty of the moments of hospital time spent together, the unmentioned vulnerability, the solemnity and weight of our bonds beneath the surface of our physical togetherness.

With all of the practice I have had, I can bypass the reflexive fear response that most people have to hospitals. The first thing that comes to my mind when I think of the hospital is love, the first thing I feel is empathy. After that, I start smelling the antiseptics and crummy food.

But if I had to pick just one word to describe it all–the good, the bad, the scary, the awkward, the noisy, the tone-deaf Beatles medleys, the silence–the only word that fits the tragic miracle that is modern medicine is human.

Have you had a particularly eye-opening experience in a hospital? Share your experiences and send get well wishes to my latest clumsy friend here, on the Lucky Fiber Designs Page (and click Like while you’re there!), on Twitter (and don’t forget to follow!), Instagram (follow, follow, follow!), Pinterest, Ravelry or by email…or the old-fashioned way: Lucky Fiber Designs P.O. Box 4 Candler, NC 28715.

[thisisspinky-blog]

#hospitaltime 💊💉🌪🚑🏥😂😅