A matter of life and death

Hospitals are odd places. Not everything that happens within a hospital’s walls is bad, certainly; people get well, they receive visits from Uncle Wally, they regain strength and motor function and they give birth to their children, a joyous occasion I’m told. Sometimes someone drives to the hospital for no other reason than to visit the cafeteria and eat lunch. That’s sort of like going to an amusement park just to use the restroom, but hey, whatever shakes their salt.

Despite all the positive things going on, hospitals project a kind of foreboding. Because bad things happen there, too. Disease. Death. Stale granola bars in the waiting room vending machine. All manner of heartbreak, really.

Which is why driving to the hospital is always a subdued, clenched-teeth kind of experience, even if the reason for going there isn’t inherently scary or life-shattering. Thing is, you simply never know for sure what’s going to happen. You could be headed there for a simple cholesterol test, or to have an MRI done, but there’s always the possibility that the attending physician looks you over and says, “Oh, I’m sorry Janet, but it turns out you have a newly-discovered illness called Dumbfoot. You’ve stubbed your toes so often that your feet have gone into revolt, and soon they’ll morph into flat slabs that look like cinderblocks. Plus you have four minutes to live. So I guess the Dumbfoot doesn’t really matter.”

Even as a six-year-old I was aware of the bizarre, random discoveries there that can blindside you. I remember going to see my great-grandmother in the hospital when I was that age, and because she spoke almost exclusively French, the visit consisted mostly of sitting quietly while she and my mother exchanged rapid fire dialogue punctuated by exclamations of “Oui!” and “Bon!” I recall zoning out, or trying to, until my great-grandmother decided to get up out of bed and retrieve something on a table near the far side of the room.

She turned around to grab said item, and I realized for the first time that hospital gowns are open in the back.

Great-grandma was about 81 or 82 at the time. I had never seen the nude posterior of a woman that age. It’s worth interjecting here to point out that, as I myself have gotten older, the women to whom I’m consistently attracted have stayed in my own age range -- the younguns don’t it for me anymore. So when I’m an elderly gentleman, I’m sure the sight of an 81-year-old woman’s backside will be just fine. Peachy, in fact.

At six years old I merely found it fascinating, much in the way that previously undiscovered underwater species are fascinating to marine biologists. Thankfully I had the tact to keep my mouth shut in the moment.

Later, having lunch at a diner with my mother, I asked her, “Mom, why does great-grandma’s butt look like the California Raisins?”

There was another first that day: I saw soda squirt out of a human nose.

The following year I spent loads of time at our local hospital. My father and grandmother were admitted to the same facility at roughly the same time, and while they both ended up fine, there were a few months in which I became all too familiar with the trappings of medicine: the gurneys, the soft colors, the aquamarine scrubs.

Mostly, though, it’s the smell I remember from that time. All hospitals seem to share it -- that sterile, disinfected odor that doesn’t quite burn the nostrils. I think the experience of being in a hospital would be completely different if they could invent a powerful cleaning product that smelled like baking doughnuts, or a fresh-cut lawn. Think of how much that would alter the vibe of the place. The way it is now, the disinfectant wafting through the air is a subliminal reminder of what it’s cleansing and camouflaging. If the rooms smelled like cake frosting it would be a whole different affair. You could repurpose a few of the rooms and rent them out to people seeking a space for their children’s birthday parties. “You’d like to book a birthday room? Excellent, sir. Will that be lilacs, fresh bread or a general potpourri?”

The good and the bad -- very few hospital experiences fall in between those two extremes. With the exception of those adventurers who casually dine in the cafeteria, you rarely have a humdrum, banal, so-so kind of day there. You never hang out in the waiting room, play three forgettable games of backgammon and then leave. You never wander into the children’s wing, find a TV and just sit down and start watching Ninja Turtles. Everything that transpires in those hospital walls is life and death, in an unnervingly literal way.

Because of these two extremes, there’s a kind of dynamic tension that exists. Every time I see a hospital I half-expect to look up at the sky above it and see a whirling vortex of clouds, with a couple of old-fashioned Biblical lightning flashes thrown in for good measure. Doesn’t it feel like they’re the center of the universe in some way? Life begins and ends there, and if you had to distill the hospital vibe down to a single word, for many of us that word would be “heavy.” They just feel heavy. The air inside them is thick with meaning.

Or maybe that’s just industrial-strength Pine Sol. Hard to know for sure. I’m telling you, if the hallways smelled like Lucky Charms marshmallows it’d be a whole different ballgame.