Sunday, December 26, 2010

Hospitals

Earlier this afternoon my family went to visit John at the hospital. Even though I work in a hospital, I've actually only visited someone in the hospital once before. I had forgotten how utterly dismal it is, no matter how much the designers try to make it look bright and happy. People die there and it seeps into the walls, so that it's always gloomy and grim.
John was asleep most of the time we were there. He has pneumonia on top of the heart trouble and the lung cancer, so he had been given some steroids and antibiotics to clear the infection, and they made him pretty loopy. He's stable, but I've never seen him look so sick. Granny was trying to stay calm, but we all know that the prognosis is really bad. They may not even be able to do a biopsy to stage the cancer because of the possibility of him bleeding to death while they do it, so they may just offer palliative radiation treatment to try and shrink the damn thing. No matter what, it all ends with him dying. No matter what, this is his endgame. We just don't know how long it will take to play out.
We left and I'm glad that I'm on vacation this week, because it seems impossible that the world can just keep going on like nothing has happened. It shouldn't keep going on; someone I love is dying. But it does. Trying to keep up with the rest of your life when it feels like everything should grind to a halt is hard. At least we all get a little bit of time to get used to it.

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