Having
been to many different hospitals over the years for a variety of reasons I have
really some to not enjoy the experience but have become unfazed by the
environment and having to spend countless hours within their walls. While much
of that calmness depends on the reasons for making the trip there, the majority
of my experience has been of the non-life-threatening variety. Mostly those
stays have involved pain and/or preventative measures… in some cases, like
allergic reactions, it would have been a different scenario had we waited any
longer.
Lately
many of those brief visits to the medical compounds have been to check in on
our son. These have been a welcomed change to the history that my wife and I
both have with many of those medical buildings. It is here that we have been
able to both see and hear our baby and really get lost in each and every
moment. It is those times when the world melts away and any pain, discomfort,
and stress disappears for a fleeting moment… it is better than any medication
that any doctor could administer.
However,
last week I was reminded of how much hospital trips can suck as I had to take a
family member to the emergency room at 1:00am (it was not my wife so don’t
freak out). It was a pain that I was all too familiar with having had a kidney stone
in the past but this one seemed to be a lot worse. At least by what I could
observe. And while we were able to quickly move through triage that is where
the quick pace ended.
This
was the first time that I had been to the emergency room at this particular
hospital in Chester County and I can’t say that I would rank it very high on
the long list of hospitals and emergency rooms that I have visited during my
life. The staff was slow and many of them didn’t seem like they knew what they
were doing… while waiting in a "room" surrounded by curtains, I could actually hear a handful of staff members asking their colleagues
where they were supposed to be. It really was a long cluster of a night/morning
that dragged on for hours.
Once
the pain was managed and the discharge papers signed, we headed back out into
the cold and slalomed down the slightly icy roads. By the time I got back home
I had about 15 minutes to sleep before my alarm would start going off. Needless
to say I got to work a little later than usual last Friday.
And
now with that experience fresh in my mind I am looking forward to what will
hopefully be my next trip to the hospital. It won’t be much longer before I
will welcome the trip to the hospital and anxiously pace around the room
waiting for the birth of our child to happen. While all these other memories
will remain, I am eagerly waiting for this new experience to be the prominent
thought in my mind when I think about hospitals.
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