A Sacred Place
The young man in his white shirt, open collar, walked past the foot of my bed to the empty space near the window. He sat on the chair in the corner, focused on his cell phone. He was in his late twenties or early thirties, attractive in his dark-rimmed glasses. This was day three after my surgery, third room, and anticipated fourth roommate. My husband objected to the first placement. A pizza party was in progress, including a number of visitors surrounding the woman in the bed assigned near the window. Hence, they reassigned me next to a middle-aged woman who had recently been released from intensive care.
She chatted the entire night, turned on lights, and watched TV, albeit having asked if it was okay. A morphine-induced agreeableness let her conversation about nurses wash over me as she identified which nurse was accommodating and who was not. She’d been hospitalized since before Christmas. This was January 8. She warned, "Stay on top of the morphine drip." Based on her advice I pressed the morphine drip so frequently that the room began to spin but not enough to erase her verbal irritation with the nurse who refused to give her pain medication before it was due.
Time swirled as did the revolving door that gave entrance to this place where snippets of lives are captured as in compartments in the door, except in the rooms we see little yet hear all. The roommate was urging me to have my pain prescription filled before leaving the hospital to prevent running out on the weekend. She confided that she keeps a bottle hidden in her closet at home for those times when she might need it. Her medical story held sway through a press-the-drip fog, and as light seeped through the window shades, she revealed that she had had bariatric surgery, two knee replacements, two shoulder replacements, a mastectomy, and was suffering from a third bout of MERSA. Sharing a room with this person became a burden greater than the incision across my abdomen. Our bellies are so vulnerable. They are not protected as the brain is by the skull, heart and lungs by the ribcage. The urge to build a protective covering over my abdomen intensified. The fright of spending another night with this woman, a walking surgical nightmare, stiffened my joints and the thought of sharing this room with microbes that breed in hospitals pushed all my limits.
That morning a kind and understanding nurse pulled the curtain between our beds and wheeled me into the third room where the young man came through the following day. In the bed by the window, a young woman was waiting to be discharged. The thoughtful nurse was attempting a favor to find me a space of my own. The curtains between our beds were drawn, but the doctor/patient conversation was not out of reach. These alleged privacy fabrics are as effective as a judge telling the jury to strike a statement from the record. Neither work. The doctor explained that her colon issue required surgery and that she needed to return to the hospital the following week. She was college age and frightened. An urge to say something to her swelled inside me, but eavesdropping did not give me the right. A half an hour later her mother and another woman came to take her home. The young woman who had been silent since the doctor left shouted at her mother:
“Leave me alone.”
“See how she speaks to me. I didn’t say anything that was hurtful,” her mother repeated to her companion.
The other woman suggested they leave and return later. No sooner had they gone when the young woman sobbed. Her tears carried me into her despair and with one press of the button, sleep triumphed. She was gone when I awoke.
Privacy, a rare commodity in a hospital, must be relished even in brief moments of rest in between constant visits of nurses, aids, and visitors. This reverie ended quickly when a middle-aged woman was wheeled into the room. The nurse swished the curtains across its noisy track to surround her bed and with it went daylight. Surrounded by a barrage of attendants whose forms were outlined by that veil of privacy, the woman kept vomiting, a sound and smell that defies disguise. When the attendants left, she remained quiet for the remainder of the night. We didn’t share talk about our procedures. She only asked one question when I made arrangements to connect the TV.
“What TV shows do you watch?”
“I’m a PBS fan," I said.
“You mean like Downton Abbey?"
“Yes,” I was happy to respond.
The conversation ended there and by the next morning she was discharged, leaving the daylight and the possibility of having a private room. Only a few hours passed when the young man made his way across the room. We exchanged a brief hello, as he settled in to await someone. He stood up, rubbed his neck, paced the empty space between us.
“Are you okay?” I asked
“I can’t believe they did this. How stupid can they be? They put her in the same room and spot where my brother died in August,” he blurts.
“Is she your wife?” I asked.
“No, my mother,” he confirmed.
Our exchange ended. I wrapped my arms around my abdomen like a snail curling into its shell, and the anticipated joy of returning home in twenty-four hours seemed selfish.
They wheeled her in about 8:00 p.m. Once more the flimsy curtain was drawn, a sieve to the conversation on the other side. She’d had a procedure and they were waiting for her to urinate so that she could go home. The young man spewed his anger:
“How could they do that? It was the same room where he spent six weeks, eating nothing but one sandwich the whole time,” he blurted between sobs.
His mother was a small woman who excused herself every time she had passed my bed to visit the bathroom. In her gentle voice she said to him:
“I don’t think of it that way. For me it is a sacred place, a place where he breathed his last breath.”
Her healing words hung in the room. They gathered his tears into a palpable silence. Mine wet the pillow.
In the dark of the early morning the surgeon came to discharge me. There was no need to draw a curtain this time; the absent young man and his mother were unable to hear that my tumor was benign. Two long-awaited hours later my husband and a hospital volunteer wheeled me through the lobby's revolving door where the faces coming in harbored many intimate stories destined to land on unintended ears.