A hospital room Flashcards
This hospital room is a chrysalis in the worst of ways, for here I am melted down to liquid and reformed into the butterfly, conscious and feeling the process at work.
Though the room is unfamiliar as we enter, in that hospital bed is a soul that has been woven into my own for as long as I can recall
Our time in the hospital room is the time we have to lift his spirits, to wrap him in a cocoon of our love
What matters most in the hospital room is not the surroundings, though they can bring a sense of calmness or even joy, it is that she feels loved, that she matters and is cherished.
The hospital room is soon warmed by the emotions we bring, by the love we tell in these bright floral blooms.
The hospital room is more like a garden, how much things have changed in the past thirty years. The roof is clear giving an impression of being outside and once in a while a butterfly will alight on a nearby leaf. The beds are still metal underneath, but technology has come so far. To the touch and to the eye they appear to be bamboo, warm and rustic. There was so much talk of expense when the first pilot hospital did this, but the results speak for themselves. Stays are shorter, healing faster, depression negligible. Turns out we’re animals after all and our “habitat” matters, that our mental and physical health are too intertwined to separate.
Seeing the room Geo is to take I immediately understand why people take flowers to hospital rooms. Despite our technological lives there is something in our natures that requires natural beauty as part of the healing process. We aren’t robots, we aren’t “units” to be fixed; Geo isn’t here for a quick oil and filter change. In their efforts not to offend they succeed in not inspiring or lifting the spirit. I know every place is on a budget but is a cheerier shade of paint really that much more?
For the first time in our lives we can afford to go private. I expected to be eaten up by guilt, knowing how bad the other system is. But being in this room is like walking into an expensive New York coffee shop. There are flowers, beautiful paintings, leather chairs and soft music. On the wall is a plasma screen and the bed looks so comfortable. Just one foot in the door and I’m as relaxed as I would be in a hotel.
Eight beds, even patients, Parker shuffles toward what must be his. Already his mind drifts back to his uncluttered home, everything pale with clean lines, elegant and calming. Home, where he can draw the blinds and pour his favourite spirit, listen to soft Jazz and browse the recordings he has’t yet seen. Here he is a unit in an institution, a bed number, a problem to be fixed on the world’s slowest moving assembly line. He lets his hand fall to the cotton sheets, clean, stiff, functional. It is a place to lie and not a bed. “Bed” means soft sheets with a lavender perfume”; it means somewhere he feels as safe as a bear in his winter den; it means comfort and privacy. This room as nothing of those things and so he mentally labels it a “trolley” instead, after all, it does have wheels and collapsable sides
ok
