This is a picture of my hospital bed the first morning I was there. The pattern in the lower right is actually my hospital gown pulled over my knees. I believed at this point that they would run some fluid through my IV and then send me home that afternoon. I would be there, as it turned out, for two more weeks, and my condition would grow worse and worse. So at this point small compositions like this were very interesting, as were the people working there. The housekeeping crew is always a good source of information on the outside world. The ladies with brooms and cleaning carts were the friendliest of all. They should get extra pay for cheering up patients. They know nothing about medicine, but everything about mothering. Sometimes the conversations were in Spanish, which was fine with me. I speak just enough Spanish to understand about half of what they’re saying. The rest I make up with smiles and nods. Even the fixit man stopped to explain the pipes he was fixing. I was an audience, and enjoyed every moment of it.

During this time I experienced two nurses that I blogged briefly about. I wrote those blogs in the hospital on an iPad, so they’re probably not what they might have been had I written them at home. They should appear in the next few days. But as my condition worsened I found myself looking forward more to breakfast than conversation. I slowly became not myself. So, while I had many wonderful nurses, and only one who really irked me, I noticed them less and less. I ended up in two different wards and six different rooms. I had two surgeries and three sessions of dialysis. I am led to believe that fifty years ago, which in my memory is not a great length of time, I would simply be dead. The technology did not exist to maintain me in this condition. But we should also be aware that fewer people could be found in my condition. We are poisoning ourselves at an alarming rate.

I’ve gone through periods of delusion after dialysis, not immediately after, but during the night. I find that my inner delusional brain is much more interesting than my outer one, the one I am using to write this. I’m tempted to write the delusions down, but they seem to change each time I remember them, as if their content depends on what I’m doing as I remember. The knowledge that the brain can go in so many directions all at once, I think, is what drove so many in the 60s to experiment with drugs. They would probably enjoy my post-dialysis delusions. But I’m told I will get used to the disturbance of my blood and the delusions will stop, and I find myself wondering if they really know this to be true or if they’re just trying to keep me calm.

One of my roommates was homeless and not anxious to get well. He turned down treatments and tests until the doctor threatened to throw him out. “Hospital beds are for making people well,” she said. Another was a dynamo who had a stroke between here and Las Vegas and was having enormous difficulty with the fact that the stroke had slowed him down. Yet another had come out of hip surgery and yelled all night for his wife and son whom he believed were just down the hall but couldn’t find him. There is an enormous quantity of sadness in hospitals mixed precariously with thankfulness and gratitude. How the nurses go to work and come home with positive attitudes totally amazes me. Thankfully, they took care of me when I was bright and conversational, and also when I was grim and in pain. One put her arm in mine and walked me downstairs to the door, rather than calling for a wheelchair and an attendant. I felt entirely undeserving, and know that she went back upstairs to do the same for others who didn’t give her a single thought. They don’t do this for the money. They are a rare breed, something humanity could learn a great deal from.