i spent 10 hours in a hospital waiting room on wednesday while my father underwent heart surgery. it was an experimental procedure of sorts because it hadn’t been done on the east coast before. the doctor who pioneered the procedure flew in to over-see and a whole group of doctors watched. they video taped it to use as a teaching aid. supposedly in time they’ll be able to perform it in a couple of hours. this time though my father was under anesthesia for over 8 hours. combine that with the pain drugs and he’s having a hard time recovering. anyhow point is i haven’t really been able to focus. been under a bit of a cloud ever since.

the procedure was successful evidently. no complications. time will tell whether it actually worked to stop his heart ablations. that’s all that can be said on that score. i’m confident that once the pain subsides a little he’ll be o.k.

as for hospitals…

my god. what awful places. spending any length of time in a hospital (as a visitor, never mind as a patient) is like setting off a psychic bunker-buster in your skull. the grandaddy of all human fears permeates every surface no matter how clinically decorated, no matter how thoroughly disinfected. stainless steal and glossy white tile are no match for its corrosion. pain and worry hang in a cloud beneath the fluorescent lights like heavy, sour, incense smoke. everywhere you look there are strange apparatuses which you feel sure are of medieval origin only gussied up with plastic coatings and blinking lights. “surely those should have no contact with a human body!” you find yourself thinking.

the population of staff are necessarily cool and aloof. you can see them engaged in their own merry making in the halls, breaking off into cliques in the cafeteria, bored or annoyed like everyone is in their own workplace. walking among the throngs of men and women in scrubs gives you the feeling of being in a foreign city where you don’t know the language and are always somewhat lost. in the back of your mind you know that one wrong turn and you’ll find yourself in a bad neighborhood; a neighborhood in which even an accidental glance at a denizen would cause instant heartbreak.

the waiting rooms are like bus station terminals. the people… well what can you say about the people?

vent
they are like people everywhere, by and large ugly and infuriating. for every anxious but civilized person flipping quietly through a magazine, immersed in their own private worry, there are 20 who help yet again to lower your opinion of humanity. loud, hideous, obnoxious, people who make themselves heard and seen in a place where by all rights, if they had any dignity or sense, they’d do their best to become invisible. the bursts of asinine sounds which escape them manages to irritate even more than the constant chatter of television ads which are so completely out of place. i suppose they serve a purpose now that i think about it. i mean they do distract you from your anxiety long enough for you to fantasize about strangling them, about them being whisked away to the strangulation unit leaving the people who know how to behave in peace.
/vent

all in all a rotten place to spend time in any capacity. my father’s still there and my thoughts are with him so blogging is, well, you know.