Hospitality

Graphic by Eric Fischer (as far as I can tell). The backstory is somewhat fascinating:

Travel both to 'hospitals' and 'medical centers' in tweets

Lines between where someone tweeted 'I'm at…Hospital' or 'I'm at…Medical Center' and where their previous geotagged tweet was. Brian Mount's doctor said told him that people prefer doctors north of them to doctors south of them.

A lot of people seem to go to Stanford Hospital from San Francisco.

(2158 pairs of tweets through June 18, 2012)

On a similar topic, this weekend I spent many hours sitting by my grandmother's bedside in the hospital. There were hectic moments, but also downtime, during which I recorded my impressions.

// 1 //

I am in the hospital watching my grandmother dying. Oh, she may not perish immediately. She may even pull through this visit to the land of vague, horrible smells and numerous tubes. But I look at her face, and it is remarkable that she has supermodel cheekbones under loose skin. Despite its unanchored sagging, her skin is very thin, thin enough that blood shows through, red in the cheeks and one large blue vein in her forehead. Her eyelids are small, warm yellow, and when her eyes open they are clear. The eyes are a lie; she is easily confused. Her lashes and eyebrows are short, almost transparent, but still she has almost full locks of muddy grey hair, threaded lightly with white.

I feel a great tenderness for her in this state of waning. She is like a fat but frail moon, swollen and yet so vulnerable. Her intestines are distended, the colon specifically. They are trying to relieve the pressure, sucking fluid through her nose and soon through a rectal tube as well.

With tears on her cheeks she told me I was an impostor. I did not insist that I was her granddaughter. If it isn't true to her right now, then it is not true. I longed to reach to wipe the wetness from her face, an ancient desire like a mother letting a baby suck, but I did not want to alarm her. And I wasn't sure she was firm enough to touch.

I told her who I was again, and again she was unsure that I was truthful. My substantiation was a flow of babble, describing my visits to her as a child.

// 2 //

It's hard to concentrate in the hospital. There is a large degree of randomness, and many sounds. Harsh sounds that the nurses don't seem to notice, the beeping of ineffective alarms and scraping as beds are pushed from place to place. I am comforted, though, by the soft creaking of some machine that is nourishing my grandmother's sleep, and by the blue numbers on the display that say her oxygen is at 100. 100 what, I don't know.

My grandmother also moves softly, shifting in her sleep. Her body is quiet for the most part, too tired and old to protest against the tubes and wires that track her functioning. A nondescript tan blanket, like the kind at a hotel, is rumpled around her shoulders. She grips the bar of the bed in her sleep, with a hand on which one finger has a monitor that glows red.

I think of her as a child who has played hard and fallen asleep. Last night she was down so deep in her fatigue that the nurses were concerned that she'd had a stroke. The doctor came in, worried in an abstract sense but personally unfazed. He pushed on her chest and shouted for her to wake up. For a moment she did, naturally distressed, but she sank back onto the pillows almost immediately. Like when you restart your phone even though the battery is run down--the start screen flashes and then lapses back to black.

Now we're in a warm, quiet private room. She slumbers. Neither of us will wake her, but when she rouses herself I will read to her.

In the hospital my attention is fractured not just by the noise, but by the feeling of limbo. We have exited real time and are occupied by constant faint nervousness. Yesterday my dad lightheartedly said to Grandma, "Hospitals are where people are born, and have their broken arms fixed..." The unsaid truth is that many people die here. Yesterday, when my grandmother was briefly in pain, she said, "I feel like I am going to die." I replied with some attempt to soothe and comfort her, but it wasn't a contradiction.

Luckily she hasn't been in pain for most of this ordeal. Scared, confused, and tired, but minimal physical discomfort.

// 3 //

My father is spooning broth and Jello into my grandmother's mouth. Suddenly music swells in from outside, like rich rainbow soap bubbles. I recognize Bonnie Prince Charlie's melody: "The Skye Boat Song". A little startled and mostly delighted, my dad puts down the spoon and pops into the hallway to check whose boombox it is. But there's a real harpist, with that swanlike instrument, plucking and strumming. Soon our turn with this volunteer is over, the musician moves on, presumably to charm some other hallway in the hospital. The melody stays in my head.