Lying in a hospital bed, as I was recently, with an IV in one’s good hand and not much energy to do anything, one tends to turn to introspection.
Last April, when I was in for surgery, a visiting priest, whom I have come to know well, asked if I had any insights as to what it is like to be a hospital patient.
I did, but at the time I brushed them aside, feeling they were too depressing to dwell on. This time, slept out and with no energy to even read, I was forced to face my demons.
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Over several hospitalizations for a chronic illness, I have come to understand why, when health reform was at its peak, there was fear in long-term care circles that the government was going to force back into the community people who were at levels one or two but had been resident in nursing homes for some years.
People become dependent, I was told. You can’t just pluck them out of the home and put them back in the community.
I understand that dependence.
At times when I have been hospitalized, the feeling of well-being is scary. I felt it this time, waking up in the middle of the night, the lights on at the nursing station, people a buzzer away to be summoned when things went wrong.
When a person enters hospital, his or her life becomes severely proscribed, to a bed, a few curtains, some walls. You are not in control.
Your family may take you to the hospital, but they will leave, going back to life while you stay behind.
A patient’s life ceases to have relevance. When I am in hospital, I will read a paper but I seldom watch TV or even look out the window to see what the weather is like. It just isn’t relevant.
People come to visit, they send flowers and fruit and magazines, for which the patient is grateful, but after their allotted time, they leave again in a glow of good will for having visited the sick.
The sick patient stays behind, once more isolated and alone.
When the day finally comes that the patient is allowed to go home, there is inevitably a lot of catching up to do.
Physically, every hospitalization leads to some deterioration and muscle tone must be regained.
Depressing insights? Yes, and I don’t pretend to have answers on how to change the way things are. I suspect it’s just a matter of acceptance, of saying that’s the way things are, of being, in the true sense of the word, a patient.
