It’s strange. Though hospitals are filled with the sick and at times the dying, they are still thriving places. Nurses, doctors, patients, therapists, visitors. Someone is always walking the halls, even at 3am, whether nurse on rounds or patient thanks to the fussy 2 year-old next to their bed. It’s an eerie thing walking into a ward, recently filled with twenty recovering patients, now scrubbed clean, every piece of furniture strapped and bolted to the floor.
I took the last three patients with slowly healing wounds to a local clinic last Friday. Their wounds will be redressed a couple of times a day for the next two weeks or so until they are out of danger from post operative infection. I had become quite close with the two women and I felt a little like we were abandoning them. The fact is we have to go, I just wish we didn’t need to leave them in such a state. Hospitals are places to heal and recover. You should find help there, not be abandoned by it. You should leave the hospital it shouldn’t leave you. I must trust that mama Beatrice, Christine and Joshua will get the care they need at the clinic we have taken them to. We have done everything we can for them, and I suppose that is all there is to do.
Empty, stacked beds. Nameplates on the walls with no names in them. Toys for absent children to play with. One might think an empty hospital is a good thing, an accomplishment, the completion of a task. To me it feels useless and unnatural. How odd that I am more comfortable in the midst of chaos and disease than in a sparkling clean, still room.
I took the last three patients with slowly healing wounds to a local clinic last Friday. Their wounds will be redressed a couple of times a day for the next two weeks or so until they are out of danger from post operative infection. I had become quite close with the two women and I felt a little like we were abandoning them. The fact is we have to go, I just wish we didn’t need to leave them in such a state. Hospitals are places to heal and recover. You should find help there, not be abandoned by it. You should leave the hospital it shouldn’t leave you. I must trust that mama Beatrice, Christine and Joshua will get the care they need at the clinic we have taken them to. We have done everything we can for them, and I suppose that is all there is to do.
Empty, stacked beds. Nameplates on the walls with no names in them. Toys for absent children to play with. One might think an empty hospital is a good thing, an accomplishment, the completion of a task. To me it feels useless and unnatural. How odd that I am more comfortable in the midst of chaos and disease than in a sparkling clean, still room.
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