10
November
2006
I know I haven’t written anything lately. Sorry Internet. I’m writing now, see?
So .. hospitals. And my phobia of them.
Not a phobia of the building per se. I go inside Neuro and Psychiatry wards every day to see the bedridden patients with a real smile on my face . Heck, I even walk the corridors of the big concrete block where the rest of the County Hospital is located without breaking in hives.
It’s all about being admitted in one. You get there in the morning, your bag packed with PJs, shampoo, toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, towels, underwear, chocolates and coffee for the cleaning ladies, 5/10 lei bills for the nurses, a few heavy envelopes for the docs, something to read and a telephone card, if you’re one of the freaks that don’t own yet a mobile, like I am.
You go into a small dark room where an angry granny directs you to undress behind a locker’s door, along with the other three ladies already undressing behind their respective locker doors. You put on your pyjamas, give her your clothes and she gets a cleaning lady to help you with the bag. You get the mandatory elevator ride from a liftiera even if you’re perfectly capable of walking on the stairs. You’re directed to your bed in a room with 1-9 other people, depending on how much money the first envelope you gave contained, you say goodbye to your family on the hall and then ..you’re on your own.
The day in the hospital consists of getting up at 5:30-6 when the nurses come to give the first round of pills/ injections/ whatever. Around 8 you’re woken up again to have your temperature taken. Urine samples will be requested from you / your kid even if you’re there because your kid put a piece of rubber toy up her nose and she’s just under observation for the day (our case) . After that, hunger sets in so you either try your luck with hospital food (macaroni with bread crumbs / macaroni with unsalted cottage cheese/ macaroni with potatoes were my three personal experiences)or go with what Mom/ the husband brought you. Since the hospital food resembles wallpaper glue with unidentifiable lumps in it, it’s wise to do the second.
After breakfast, comes a long, boring succession of discussions with the roommate(s), trips to the sink, reading whatever book you brought with you, looking out the window, getting your medicines, occasional snackings, trips to the toilet, visits from the family and more looking out the window. Oh, and the doc’s visit (”And how are we feeling today?” *Insert anything from “Just ducky” to “I coughed out my spline 5 minutes ago, the liver seems to be next”* “Mmhmm, good, good”) In the end you go to bed only to be woken up, invariably, two hours later to get your medicine/ be poked with something. Lather, rinse, repeat
It’s not the very idea of hospital that brings me down . It’s the small details - the constant wearing of PJs, the fact that the bloody light has to stay on all night in the hall, and the upper part of the wall has been replaced with glass, so that it shines in your eyes. The never ending poking. The condescendence with which your questions about the medication, the actual diagnosis and the length of your staying there are met. That oh-so-shy “why, you shouldn’t have” said when you give the chocolate/ banknote/ envelope and the following attitude change. The big, fat cockroaches you see on the wall when you’re woken up for poking, lazily fleeing from the light under your bed. The too high beds when you have an abdominal incision, and no stool anywhere. The bathrooms full of smokers. The crushing lack of care non-envelope giving people get.The lack of sleep. The lack of dignity.
Somewhere in the next two years I’ll go back there to bring kid 2 to this world. The title of the post describes accurately my feelings about this perspective.
Posted: hospital
19
October
2006
Adina came back from a week-long vacation and the Ambulatoriu is filled with people. I’ve also had my request for the remaining vacation days approved - so I’ll be home next month from the 6th to the 30th. I intend to spend those days teaching Timi lots of words in both Romanian and Hungarian, cooking yummy foods, doing petit point and reading the forensic Psychology books a certain Californian has sent me. Oh, and going to Robi’s middle sister’s wedding. Posting of slightly drunken people’s pics from Miercurea Ciuc should be expected after the event.
Yesterday’s “You think your life sucks?” case was a lady from the mountains, suffering from depression. Asked about the source of her condition, she told me how she married young, and two or three years after the wedding she discovered her husband had an affair with her mom.
“Pardon me?” said I , reaching for my jaw which dropped to the floor with a loud thud.
“Yes, I even caught them doing it once .. but I suspect he was involved with her prior to our marriage, after all, he almost never touched me, even as newlyweds.”
“Any concrete evidence for that?”
“No .. but tell me, if not, why was he having sex with me at most 2-3 times a year? And why, when he sensed the slightest sign that I was enjoying what we were doing, he preferred to stop than to let me feel pleasure?”
After a few years of being faithful to somebody who couldn’t care less, she started having violent headaches, to which no doc could find an organic explanation (… duh). She then sunk into depression, got out , sunk again and so on. For twenty years out of twenty-five of marriage.
“How come you didn’t divorce?”
“I’m an Orthodox, miss .. I spoke to a few priests and they told me to have patience and bear my cross .. I also hoped he would change, maybe see that he should be with me, not my mom and return to the family.”
“So you have kids with him?”
“Two boys - the older is in Spain, the other is 20 and living with me. He probably knows what’s happening”
“And how did that affect him?”
“He was upset for weeks, and didn’t want to talk to his dad anymore .. but after a while my husband left home and I got fired so money became very scarce. And my son needed money for the bus to school”
“And?”
“And one day my son told me -Ma, you know I wouldn’t ask you if there would be any other way ..but you need to track down dad. He has to drive some workers each day to a construction site on this street, so you should find a cab with tinted windows and follow him, find out where he moved”
“So what did you do?”
“I did what he said .. told the cab driver to follow my husband’s car and went to the outskirts of the city where I discovered he had a new mistress.”
“While still being with your mom?”
“Yes”
“Go on”
“I did confront him, but he told me he was free to do whatever he wanted, and so was I for all he cared. He gave me the money for the son and told me to go away. And I went.”
The pattern of frequent depression episodes continued until recently when one of the docs told her that she should really find herself a worthy man instead of the pondscum she was married to. She took her advice and fell in love with somebody she’s still with at the moment (4 months and counting). She says she’s learning now how to feel happy again.
Posted: hospital
16
October
2006
The last 24 hours were probably cursed by an angry voodoo-skilled patient. That, or the Great Powers That Be were out to get me.
It started yesterday, when my parents asked us to help harvesting the grapes from their wineyard. We accepted and merrily proceeded to part the nectar-holding spheres from their vines. Laughter and chatting was all you could hear over the rows, until, oh faithful readers, I’ve put my hand between two curs’d leaves and reached for a forbidden fruit. The sting! The pain! The cry of sheer horror! A yellowjacketed guardian flew away and I was left there cursing while the stung finger burned like a Texas barbecue and quickly turned to red. It also friggin’doubled its size. I was sent to rest and hold it under cold water. The water turned out to be a bad idea (the pain worsened) but gently blowing air on it while watching the reddened vein-pattern on the back of the finger proved to be effective. Now it only hurts when I touch something cold with it.
Today started with a headache. Mind you, usually headaches got nothin’on me - I sigh, promise myself to get more sleep, dismiss the Nurofen pill graciously and it goes away in an hour or so. Today’s headache was the rabid kind - hours and hours of rubbing the temples, applying water and feeling nauseated. Then again, lots of people around me were complaining of the same symptoms so it was probably some atmospheric front effect . I hope so, because the noggin is still hurting.
Then there was the bathroom door. More precisely, my workplace’s bathroom door. I discovered this morning that it had swollen in the weekend from the humidity and so, you couldn’t close it from the outside. Therefore, when nature called, I locked the door of my room - where the entrance to our bathroom is located - entered the bathroom and just for fun, I slammed it once more. Surprisingly, it worked. Not so surprisingly, it worked so well that now I couldn’t open it. I tried with one hand, two hands, two hands and a leg - still couldn’t open it. Then I realised that I was in the middle of a B-list comedy - the only key to my room was on the table so even if I’d shouted there was no chance anybody could open and help me. And I laughed at how Murphy was proven right again. Fortunately, he’s not infaillible - I focused, invoked the spirit of the Great Leather Couch -you know, the shrink’s totem animal - kicked it once more and the door opened.
Somewhere on a cloud Papillon was probably winking at me.
Posted: hospital, chestii
9
October
2006
*It’s 5 AM and I can’t sleep because of fever and muscle aching. I haaaaaaaaate the flu. *
… Gorgeous gipsy girl comes in with her mom, sits down and looks at me. The mom starts telling me then how healthy her girl is, how she’s strong and loves to do housework and how she had an epilepsia-like crisis when she was five, but didn’t have another since then. I look at them in amazement (why is she here then?) and ask how can I help .
Turns out the girl is to be married to a wealthier guy, but he found out from some spiteful rival that she has mental handicap papers and suffers from epilepsia, and now the girl’s family wants to get rid of the handicap proofs and get her pronounced clinically healthy. The mom slimes around me, repeating that I should “take care” of the girl and then she’ll “take care of my needs” in return. I tell her I’ll write exactly what I’ll find and get her out of the room.
The girl doesn’t turn out to be an epileptic, but she’s mentally deficient, with an IQ of 58. Lord knows it was strange to watch a deficient trying hard to cheat the tests for a better result, instead of the usual “let’s play dumb and hope she won’t see that”. I write the papers and have a little chat with her about how a guy that stops loving her because she might have epi probably isn’t worth much. She agrees and says it’s her future mother-in-law that keeps pushing the son to demand proof of her health.
Mom comes in, tries to slip me a 50 RON note (around 18$ - five days’ payment in my case) and I almost have to battle her to make her understand that I won’t take the money. They leave.
Posted: hospital
5
October
2006
These last few days saw both the return to my usual room and the most interesting cases of the year. It was like the patients that truly deserve to be called “loons” and not only “mentally disturbed people” decided simmultaneously : “Hey! Let’s pay Shrinkmamma a visit! She’ll be glad! Maybe she’ll even give us cookies! Cookies are good!”
The best was a woman that sat silently for the first half of the examination, staring at me with a bored absent gaze that even Garfield on a Monday couldn’t match. In the mean time I was trying to get anything out of her, anything, so that I could get a bit of a view on her thoughts and beliefs. No luck.
After a while, her brother got the brilliant idea to ask her for a bit of money to go buy bananas. That’s when we were suddenly drowned under a torrent of angry speech from the lady with the central point being that neither her brother, nor me or the mean people that were after her and kept opening the door (Adina’s patients, asking for their files) won’t touch her money. Fine by me, since now she was responsive.
…or so I thought. I could ask her anything, from what’s her name to who shot Kennedy, and she would answer joyfully something completely senseless (”Yeah, apple trees are in blossom, Miss. Aren’t grasshoppers cute?”). Dana was snickering behind me, trying really hard not to burst into laughter. After a while she started coughing, announced loudly that she had to go pee and left the room. I could hear her on the corridor (”Bwahahaha .. frogs bloom pink in spring ..heeeee!”). It wasn’t helping my straight face at all.
I managed to gather enough data in the end from her rare coherrent seconds and her brother’s answers .The image of the blooming pink frog still ocasionally springs back in my mind.
Posted: hospital
2
October
2006
Guy comes in, says he came with his Ma to get her examined for the handicap comission, and that she’s in an ambulance outside the Ambulatoriu, waiting to be examined . I ask for the papers, learn that she has Dementia and is paralysed, so she has to be examined in the car.
The woman is alert but her answers are illogical (for example I ask her what’s the name of her son and she starts to tell me how she needs to go back home to sow some seeds) and she has no idea of the date or the place she’s at. Seeing that her memory and attention are also below the ground, I conclude that I saw enough and go back to my place to write the papers.
We make some smalltalk with her son while I’m writing and I ask when did she first start to exhibit the symptoms, especially since in her ID picture she looks like a healthy and strong woman. He then almost bursts into tears and tells me that she was a strong woman indeed, raising her kids alone and working at the field most of her life. She was like this until 12 years ago, when a man has beaten and raped her. He was caught three years later, when he tried to rape two other women, but by that time the damage was done - she turned to madness to protect herself.
He described how she started to gradually retreat from life and from interactions with the others ; how she washed less and less until she stopped washing herself; and how when she was asked why she was doing it she said that she wanted to look ugly and smell because this way she could be sure that nobody tries to touch her again . He described how she hit him when he tried to wash her; and how she then slipped into dementia.
I fear the disease she has most of all, even more than cancer. Yet in her case, I’m not sure if it wasn’t for the better. You see, this way she forgot.
Posted: hospital
3
September
2006
There was one thing that happened during Sean’s visit that I forgot to tell you about. Sunday morning at 7 am while everybody was sleeping peacefully I hear a loud knock on the door completed with the doorbell ringing.”Oh fod it, the milklady is really coming early this week” thinks the one neuron awoken in my poor head. “Let’s try to go back to sleep, maybe Robi will answer it ..or she’ll give up”. But the ringing gets more insistent so I surrender and go to open the door.
What I see is a young long-haired guy with an impenetrable face, staring at me.”Yes, what do you want?” He doesn’t answer, and tries to enter. I manage to close the door. Then, because the neuron that was on duty happened to be Dopey, the Cortex Idiot, I open again, thinking that maybe he really had something to say and I didn’t hear it. He stares at me again, I ask again what he wants and he tries again to enter. I push as hard as possible and close the door, after which the rest of the brain cells decide to wake up and my IQ rises over that of an earthworm’s. So I run and wake up Robi. The doorbell starts ringing again.
“There’saguyatthedoorandhetriedtogetinthehouseandhe’sringingpleasedosomething!!
Robi, cool as a Jedi master, says “Ok” and goes to the door. Me, judging that one man to defend the gates is good, but two are better, wake up Sean who jumps out of the bed and goes near Robi. The guy outside mumbles defensively something about looking for a Monica and then says the name of the family that lives on the 2nd floor. Robi directs him to the right door, Sean comments something about the guy being lucky for not getting him as the door-answerer and we go back to sleep.
I saw The Monica yesterday while we were getting in the car to go shopping. She looked very guilty when she saw us. Considering that the guy was either high or drunk as a skunk, there was no need to ask why.
In completely different news, remember this post? Guess who broke up with the good guy and got it back on with MrBig? And by golly, she’s not even blonde anymore.
Posted: hospital, chestii
