What I Bring Home From The Hospital… or…when the hospital comes home with me…

 

What I Bring Home From The Hospital…

                                            or…when the hospital comes home with me…

 

Sometimes, after we return from my husband’s treatment at Hadassah Hospital, I am OK. Relatively. The fact that the treatments work and my husband is feeling better, it helps.

But sometimes, no matter how zen and detached I try to be, it doesn’t work. The people there, their pain and suffering. It gets to me. And then it leaves me like after a storm wrecked the neighborhood of my soul.

It takes me a number of days to put myself together, to try and forget, or at least to push at the back of my mind whatever I witnessed. Because, whenever I close my eyes, the images play behind my eyelids, over and over. Sick people, so many sick people. Old and young, too. Faces trying to be brave, faces reflecting the suffering inside. Legs barely shuffling across the floor. Hushed voices. The silence pierced by a shrill cry. Somebody shouts; I hear feet running.

I wander the corridors of the hospital searching for a quiet, remote place to sit for a few minutes, to gather my thoughts, to wipe my tears.

But around me, patients and personnel are engaged in a strange dance, to and fro, like the waves of an unrelented sea.

How do they do it?

My husband’s doctor doesn’t have a moment for herself. Patients, colleagues, staff, they all want her time and attention. Which she gives, without pause, with a smile and a good word. The nurses and the other people that work there are in a perpetual motion. They come and go, talk to everybody, they know their names, their families. In between tests, treatments, filled forms they find that precious minute of empathy that means the world to a frightened patient. And the ladies, the volunteers that share snacks, food, coffees. They have the most brilliant smiles and are deeply offended if you refuse them.

Together they form this strange universe, stars and planets, galaxies that gravitate one around the other, in synchrony, sometimes perfect, sometimes terribly out of balance. Like life and death. 

 

When I come back home, distressed and sad, the feeling lingers with me for days. I carry with me their agony and grief, their hopes and desperation, like chains around my ankles. So let me be, don’t ask me questions and don’t try to make me feel better. I won’t. But it will pass. To blossom again, like flower made of ice, in my heart, next time I visit there.