Hmmm, what wisdom can I take away from four more days in the hospital?
I am resting at home after my fourth hospital stay in the last three months following colon surgery and post-op complications. Fortunately, this last episode resolved quickly and my stay was short – warding off the spectre of a second surgical procedure.
I have learned to look beyond the obvious for a lesson to be learned or an insight to be gained from these obstacles that life throws in our path. There is no shortage of possibilities for consideration from this latest storm.
The hospital ER experience is always stressful. It consistently requires five or six hours to work through the various tests, with wait times in between, to enable a diagnosis. But on this occasion the hospital was in serious gridlock status. I waited 19 hours on a stretcher, with many other patients, in the hallway outside the ER for a bed to become available.
I wonder if I should be vocal decrying the underfunding of our hospital system. But the problem is not exclusively political. Our aging society, with the wave of the Baby Boom generation reaching later years of life where medical issues are more prevalent, is a major factor. And what about the ability of medical science to prolong life. Is that a double-edged sword?
Takeaway: There is seldom a simple answer to society’s most troublesome issues.
Once I was in a room and feeling better, I began to roam the hospital hallways to reboot my system. I peered discretely into rooms seeing many patients who were far more ill than me.
The aged patients were particularly troubling with their shrunken and failing bodies, haggard faces and expressions of suffering and the absence of hope. I have been in several hospital rooms where the families were maintaining a morning to evening vigil not knowing how long their loved one might have left.
Takeaway: Death can be a cruel tyrant. No one should face it alone.
This time around I was in a room with an indigent man who was admitted for amputation surgery because of unmanaged diabetes of which he was unaware. A caseworker was working diligently to find a new place for him to live which he could afford on his Ontario Works pension and which had no stairs as he would require a walker while his foot healed.
Takeaway: No matter how difficult my situation, there is always someone worse off than me.
In the end, what drove home these insights was the sound the IV Pump makes when the flow through the tube is interrupted or the IV is disconnected for a few moments. A repetitive beeeeep-beep, beeeeep-beep, beeeeep-beep that was omnipresent day and night.
This sound haunted me as though it was warning of things I did not want to contemplate. It became an auditory metaphor for the suffering and tenuous hold on hope surrounding me. I was frustrated at my recurring health issue. But the plaintive tolling of the IV alarm bell reprimanded me and forced me to acknowledge how fortunate I am in the grander scheme of things.
~ My Latest Work: Hunting Muskie, Rites of Passage – Stories by Michael Robert Dyet
~ Michael Robert Dyet is the author of Until the Deep Water Stills – An Internet-enhanced Novel which was a double winner in the Reader Views Literary Awards 2009. Visit my website at www.mdyetmetaphor.com or the novel online companion at www.mdyetmetaphor.com/blog.
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Tags: death · hope · hospital · IV pump · metaphor · Michael Robert Dyet · suffering · tolling bellNo Comments