Hard Times
Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.
Robert Frost
I’ve had a good deal of experience with health care facilities. One memorable summer, I took one relation or another to our local Insta-care every week for nine weeks in a row–eight different kids and one intrepid husband.
My husband has a seriously single-minded view of the world. Once he defines a situation, there is no other possible interpretation of events. Such was the case when he got wind of a “bicycle chop-shop” in an abandoned house a few blocks away. When he peered into the split-level basement windows and clearly saw remnants of bike parts strewn around, he called the local police precinct. They promised to investigate, but it was summer, and crime had picked up considerably with the warm weather.
For a couple of weeks, my husband “accidentally” walked past the house every day or so to see if there was any obvious activity. He stewed about the problem, muttering under his breath about “poor little kids” and the “jerks who preyed on them.” Finally, he reached his tipping point. “Somebody had to do something.” Not surprisingly, he picked “himself”.
Early one afternoon, he skulked around the perimeter of the house, assuring it was devoid of criminal types, and then he started jimmying doors and windows, looking for an unlocked one. When downstairs bathroom window slid open smoothly, he saw his opportunity. The window panel was only about 15 inches wide, but he’d been doing some intermittent jogging, so he figured he could contort his way in.
His upper body was no problem. However, when he found himself hanging halfway inside, he realized there was nothing to hold onto to leverage the lower half of his body down except the toilet directly below him. He reached out and grabbed it simultaneous with his hips and legs slipping through the opening. His full weight hit the porcelain bowl at cockeyed angle, shattering the commode and slashing a sizable opening down his forearm. Blood splattered everywhere.
Wrapping the corner of his shirt around his arm, he decided to abandon his research before some nefarious bad guy discovered his interference. The front door was no difficulty from inside the house, so he brazenly walked out, and down the street, a drops of blood trail behind him. When he got home, we disinfected the wound as best we could—it was made by a toilet after all. I created a makeshift sling/bandage, and we headed for Insta-care. Seeing the amount of blood covering the front of his shirt, the alarmed receptionist took us straight into an examining room. The doc turned out to be a young, cheerful guy who asked my husband how he’d made such a mess of his arm? My husband can’t resist a good story, so he launched into a lengthy, detailed account.
“He’s lucky he hasn’t been arrested for ‘breaking and entering,’” I muttered under my breath as the doc finished up the stitches.
The doc’s eyes twinkled. “Don’t you mean ‘entering and breaking’?” he asked.
“Well,” said my husband, who was quite proud of his daring exploit, “I bet you’ve never had any other patient cut themselves up by falling onto a toilet.”
“Nah,” the doc demurred. “You’re the second one this week!”
In the last 30 days, how things have changed. On Friday, because of the quarantine, we had a virtual birthday party on Zoom for Daughter #1’s significant celebration. Eighteen different family groups signed on including Son #5. When his picture flashed on the screen, he was wearing scrubs, a cap, two different layers of mask, and a stethoscope hanging around his neck. He had just come from providing anesthesia for two moms having new babies.
Son #3 was there, too. He had been exposed to COVID 19 when caring for one of his cancer patients, so though there was no evidence of infection, for precaution’s sake, he had worn a mask full time on every shift, and because he has four young children, he wore the mask at home for the required number of days, too.
Daughter # 2, a school nurse who had organized the party, had been picking up a couple of weekend shifts at a local nursing home because the facility was so desperate for help to care for aging and disabled patients. Part of her uniform is a required mask. When she gets home, she sheds her scrubs, dumps them in the washer, and showers thoroughly before she greets her family.
Less than a week ago, I walked into hospital nearby to pick up an extended family member who was being discharged. It was an eerie shadow of the past. There was a pressurized tent outside the emergency room door, and a nurse wearing a mask screened me before allowing me to enter. Then she led me through a maze of halls where I neither saw nor heard a single other person. When we found the room of the patient I was picking up, the nurse lent her an arm, helping my family member walk slowly to the car, both of them six feet behind me. At the exit, no one checked for paperwork or gave final instructions. No chitchat about having a “good day.” Just a silent nod.
To be honest, it was a chilling experience. I did not ignore the irony of walking into the hospital, our society’s icon of health and safety, and feeling a shiver of concern that I might contract a disease here that could be life-threatening to someone my age. I missed the cheerful chatter of orderlies and technicians, the clatter of rolling carts from food service, the bright zany patterns on the scrubs of nurses and docs in pediatrics, and the pervasive sense that whatever the problem, there were people here who could make it better.
I am certain that down the road, each of those good people will have played a part in making “better” happen. But for now, I add my prayers to Heaven in their behalf. And I stay home, so hopefully, there will be one less person they need to worry about.