I never imagine I would be in the hospital for so long. When I collapsed mid shift at my auto shop if I thought I was just exhaustion I never imagined that six months later, the doctors still wouldn't know what was wrong with me, I'd still be forced to spend every day in a hospital bed just waiting for the latest specialist they brought in to get done poking and prodding and doing the same tests that countless others have done prior and countless others would do in the future.
I was beginning to doubt there is anything really wrong with me at all, yes I had lost the power speech and had quickly transformed from a husky 270 pounds to just 135, but I had always been meaning to take that weighed off anyway and I never been much of a talker so I barely noticed that part. I just wanted out of the hospital.
I didn't have very good Health Insurance so despite my long stay I was forced to share a room, this is both a very good thing and a bad thing, it gave me someone to 'talk' to during the downtime between all the various tests I was forced to do, but at the same time he had gotten tired of seeing people come and go.
My first roommate was named Gertrude Williams she was a woman in her late seventies. She was in the hospital for a broken hip and because her family couldn't be bothered to take care of her she had to stay a lot longer than the regular week that most patients with the same condition stayed. Despite being so different we got along well. She had stayed for about 3 months participating in her physical therapy every day. Until one day I woke up and she wasn't there. I was more upset than worried, we have become very good friends during her time bonding over silly things like our pets, we both had an affinity for Dalmatians, and over more serious things. After a new roommate moved in I got very worried, I kept asking the nurses, I had a large dry erase board perched on my night stand at all times, but nobody seemed to want to give me an answer. Even now I have no clue what happened to her.
My next roommate was a man in his mid forties who had no interest in talking to me, so for about a week I was mainly silent, I sat in my chair and watch TV all day. I never picked up what was wrong with the man but eventually he left. The rest of his roommates it was a mixed bag, there is a month where no one stayed longer than three days, many got better, but there are some who didn't, it made me feel pretty bleak about my own prospects.
My current roommate is a little boy with brain cancer named Shaun, I think he's about eight years old. Despite the age gap we get along pretty good, he's been here about a month and he has her entire family in the areas so they visited often. It's nice having all the company because my family can't visit often, it's far too much travel to make the trip more than once a month. I understood they had to work, but it still hurt seeing all the support and love that Shaun received, and receiving little of that myself. Shaun was a great kid, and he was really into cars, so we spent most of our days talking about all the cars that we wanted and all the customization we would do if we have the money, and in his case the driver's license.
It was just another day at the hospital, I was waiting for Dr. Johansson, a brain specialist from Sweden, to arrive to do some tests, when in walked the prettiest nurse I had seen, and I had been there for six months and had met every nurse in the hospital but not this one. She had bright auburn hair and the greenest eyes I had ever seen. I cursed my condition as I picked up my dry erase board, I’m sure it was really hard to pick up chicks, especially beautiful ones, when you couldn't even properly talk to them. "Hi." I wrote. "Oh, hello there Mr. Connor, my name is Erica and I’ve been assigned to your case.” For the shit that was going wrong in my life, at least I got a pretty nurse.
No comments:
Post a Comment