My 1st admittance: Jan 2016. VGH Neurology. 19 days
Admitted due to abdominal cramping with sufficient frequency to interfere with independent living (ie not always being able to get out of bed on my own). 19 days for intermittent constipation!
The night of my 1st admittance - after the old-hippy Porter, in her faux Zonda Nellis
garb, had wheeled my gurney from the ER: through
the hospital’s in the dead of night
labyrinth; up elevators emptied of urgency; mounting floors of which I lost
count as she told me she has been doing this job for 37 years going home after
each night shift to raise her 3 kids - after she had passed me off to two nurses on
the Neurological Ward, still prone, I was delivered through a sporadically lit
Souk of curtained bed stalls. Our passage wove its way deep into the furthest
nook of the irregular polygonal room. As each passed curtain drafted, patients
stirred and shivered on railed-in hospital beds, swaddled in steamed Mother Teresa-blue lined on white-sari flannel
sheets.
It
was 2am by the time the IV saline had dripped me to sleep.
My first neighbour was an
elderly British-born, Oak Bay Victoria-residing, retired professor of some
obscure high tech specialized domain: something high tech and specialized to do
with crystals. Throughout the day we
enjoyed a polite discourse on various subjects suitable to our circumstances.
Under night’s covers, his
nurse inserted a catheter tube up his
urethra. His groans of (one would assume) pain were exactly what one would
assume were groans of erotic pleasure.
Unexpectedly aroused by
the phlegmish tumescence of an 80+
year old man, I slipped into vivid dreams of erotic highlights of my own…
Next morning, he was gone.
And I was moved.
After one night alone in
my new semi-private curtain–delimited territory, my new neighbour arrived, after midnight, in a haze of burlesque. Marilyn: who, with her whisky-gravelled
voice, tottering high heeled swagger, and dishevelled glam contour (without
glasses with which to pierce the ambience of her entrance, my eyes grasped but
a few precise details) Marilyn was, I surmised, transgender or in drag.
After a restless raucous
night demanding her bottle (apparently lost along with one high-heeled
stiletto) she simmered down to kitteny whimpers begging breathlessly for
someone’s aid… after a while, I began ringing the nurse call bell for Marilyn
(who, I had realized by then, was in fact a woman).
The Acute Neurology Ward
was not her place: in the morning she was gone.
After Marilyn, an elderly
Asian lady, spoon-cocooned in a Patient Ceiling Lift Sling, was finely draped
onto the bed in the other half of our semi—private room.
Draped from her antiquated
ivory, crucified-Jesus crossed feet,
her archer-bow calves unfurled drawing out her long since sexless entrejambes.
Her pelvis cradle swayed wafted
settled;
Her arms: with hands mudra-stilled
in the gowned, nearly-bald nest of her lap; parentheses of her supine self.
Until finally her seahorse
spine (hinged to the skull encasing her neurologically compromised brain) unfurled
to plunk her head on the hard-stuffed vinyl pillow with its coarse fabric, yellow
pillow slip…
Her family sat in muted vigil
over the mama who would soon depart: Parkinson’s, Dementia, and finally, a
Stroke would carry off her venerable being. In their silence, the daughter: gracious,
reverent and too damned apologetic; praised my forbearance amidst their soundless cacophony of grief.
We would meet again, that
Daughter and I. And her past beauty of spirit would constrain my righteous
anger at a mismanaged Hospital Discharge Plan and her role, as a hospital
employee, in its maladministration. (I would come to learn that such plans
imposed upon me by hospital teams of expert social workers were never what I
needed: either the team didn’t allow for my greater knowledge of my own
apartment and the particularities and restrictions of its management or else we all
failed to recognize my hesitation to return home as fear of returning to what
had become a highly unstable, threatening, traumatizing space; refuge from which,
for a time, could only be found in hospital. Eventually, inevitably, the
hospital would become another site of threat and neglect, abandonment and loss…
