Memories of Time Gone By
If you’re serious about losing those few extra pounds, skip the spa. Instead, spend a week at the hospital.
I’ve only been home for a week, but it seems like a whole different lifetime that I was serving my sentence at Northridge Hospital.
When I think back, I immediately focus on the food. If the men and women who carried in the trays weren’t so friendly, and if I hadn’t realized they were essentially innocent bystanders, I would have accused them of aiding and abetting in a felony.
Being at the mercy of the hospital TV reminded me how lucky I am at home to have the ability to record everything I watch and to be able to fast-forward through commercials. I was already aware of the fact that the wonky sponsors were pushing a narrative that most families in America are bi-racial. The conceit was so prevalent, it left me wondering if there is a black man, woman or child, who hasn’t appeared in at least one breakfast cereal commercial. The white actors who appear are generally cast as fathers, who seem thrilled to be surrounded by offspring who don’t look anything at all like his side of the family.
The less said about hospital gowns, the better. It did make me wonder about the strange creature who invented them. I have no doubt that he was closely related to the sadist who came up with the shot that could only be injected into my stomach at 3 a.m. Moreover, I have a hunch that the third brother in the family is the schmuck in charge of designing women’s shoes.
I have nothing bad to say about the nurses (male and female) who did their best to make my time in Hell as pleasant as possible. The villain of the piece is hospital protocol. The folks who come up with illogical rules and brain-numbing regulations aren’t the folks who have to enforce them and therefore bear the inevitable resentment. They remind me of legislators who pass laws they are free to ignore.
Just in case you are one of those strange ducks who can actually fall asleep in a hospital bed, they have come up with a monitor (as with all the other monitors, I have no idea what bodily function was being monitored) that would make a loud beep every few seconds. It not only prevented you from sleeping, but it made you feel as if you were Wile E. Coyote being harassed by the Road Runner.
I tried ordering dynamite from the Acme Company, but there was some problem with my credit card.
Something I couldn’t fathom involved their shoving one of those long swabbing sticks so far up my nose I thought they were performing brain surgery, they got a negative Covid response. But the attending physician declared that they get 30% false negatives, and so he was sending me to the Covid isolation unit. A day later, they conducted a second swab. When that also proved negative, the doctor sent me back into the general population.
I was happy to be out of the notorious Covid prison, but it seemed illogical to me. I mean, if 30% of the tests are false negatives, it’s hardly meaningful that I passed two times in a row. They could both be wrong. But for once, I refrained from arguing my case.
Speaking of Covid, I actually lost count of the times that doctors and nurses asked me if I’d been vaccinated. None of them expressed contempt or even disappointment when I confessed to being a holdout. It was more in the nature of a poll. I began to wonder if there was a hospital pool, and began to expect a janitor to pop his head in my room and ask me if I’d been vaccinated. And when I’d say, “No, I haven’t,” I pictured him giving me a big thumbs-up and announcing he had 51% No in the custodian pool.
A tip to the ladies: If you’re serious about losing those few extra pounds, skip the spa. Instead, spend a week at the hospital. The pounds will just melt away. But you have to play fair. No sneaking edible food in, cleverly disguised as edible food. The secret is that they’ve never actually seen edible food, but have only heard rumors that it exists.
Because I have a tough time swallowing pills, the daily regimen that involved ingesting 13 every morning was a painful experience. To ensure that I knew what I was taking, they would ask if I was aware of the possible side effects. I was too busy trying to get a pill or capsule past my esophagus to pay them too much attention. But I soon discovered that if I replied “vomiting,” “constipation” or “pain,” I could ace the exam.
To this day, I don’t know why they brought me apple juice with every meal, even though I kept telling them that I felt as if I was in nursery school, and begged for a reprieve. Only on the last day did a whistleblowing nurse admit that cranberry and orange juice were also available.
On the next to last morning, an Asian nurse who had only the most casual relationship to English got the call to escort me to the bathroom. Just before I concluded my business, she popped her head in and I had to shoo her out. After I flushed, she voiced her annoyance: “Must see. Must see in bowl. Must record everything.”
I’m afraid she had to settle for a word picture.
Overall, I’d say the problem with being a hospital patient is that even the best doctors and nurses seem to forget that you’re an adult and have become accustomed to being treated like one.
It’s bad enough that by entering this labyrinth of horrors, you surrender all claims to being an individual with fewer rights than a lab rat.
I felt that everyone would have been a lot happier if I had been transferred over to pediatrics where they could have checked out the contents of my diapers to their heart’s content. After all, if there’s one abiding rule at Northridge it’s that we must record everything.
And Lord knows, I’ve done my level best.
You can email Burt directly at [email protected].
