So part of my recuperation seems to include taking baths. This is unusual for me. I’m a shower kinda gal. I don’t take baths. But baths help me relax while the pain meds take effect. The thing about pancreatitis is that it causes the sort of stomach pain that makes you want to cheerfully gut yourself. Cheerfully. Hari Kari begins to sound like a happy dance. As LightUncle1 said, “It’s like seasickness. First you’re afraid you won’t live. Then you’re afraid you will.” So, it takes a while for the pain meds to cut through all that and I’ve discovered that a bath helps relax. Admittedly, the pain is less and less each day. So it could just be that I am learning to enjoy baths … but … shhhh … that will be our secret.

I’ve discovered some things while taking baths. I’ve learned how to turn off the water with my feet. That was relatively simple, since I’m one of those prehensile folks who can pick up pencils with my toes. I still can’t open the drain with my toes, though. It’s one of those newfangled drains which require twisting and pulling simultaneously and I don’t have enough toe strength for that. I’ve learned that two ceramic tiles will come to the midpoint of my big toe … you know that place where your big toe is at it’s widest point? Just below the bottom of your toenail. One ceramic tile is approximately three-fourths of an inch wider than my foot at it’s widest point. This is why I fondly refer to my feet as dubble-wahd’s. It is also why I spend my life in Birkenstocks. My feet are not nearly as pretty as Grace’s.

Baths have given me time to reflect on some things that took place in the hospital this weekend. Hospitals are interesting places. Interesting the way a petri dish is interesting … stinky, fuzzy and of somewhat questionable character, but interesting nonetheless. Mind you, I had a fairly good hospital experience. Nothing terribly earth shattering happened.

Here’s the thing though. I never felt like I mattered. My health was not the end result that any one cared about. My health was fodder for paperwork, but whether or not I improved or not didn’t seem to matter. This became abundantly clear to me on Sunday morning when it was time for my pain meds, I made a call to the nursing station to ask for them. I was told they’d be right down. So I waited for several days that half hour and called again, whereupon I was told, “We’ll be down as soon as we can.” in a very sharp tone. After a couple more hours (alright … 10 minutes … I’m telling you what it felt like), a strange nurse came rushing and practically threw the pills at me saying, “Your nurse is too busy finishing her paperwork to bring these.” Oh well … next time, just bring the knife. Sorry to bust up her paperwork drill.

Too busy finishing up her paperwork to … um … I dunno … DO HER JOB. I rather thought the job of a nurse was to take care of sick people. But apparently it’s to fill out paperwork.

Earlier in the same shift the tech assigned to my room noted that I was running a fever of almost 102. She told me she’d tell my nurse so the nurse could handle it. Well the nurse never mentioned it to me. So I mentioned it to her. She looked me straight in the face and said, “Well, you know it’s very warm in here. I’m cold all the time, unless I’m here and then I’m warm, so I’m sure it’s just that.” I didn’t want to break it to her that we gave up being reptiles several million years ago … oh … and I was also to benumbed with dilaudid and illness to think that quickly. All I could think on the spot was, “Huh? Is this truly a health professional telling me I have a fever because I’m sitting in a warm room?? … That cannot be.” Then I became truly befuddled.

Through all of this I was hooked up to an IV of saline solution to make sure I was properly hydrated. This was started almost immediately upon my admittance to the ER. Since we had no idea that time how long this was going to last they put it in the regular place, the crook of my (left) elbow. Well, the machine to which I was hooked up stopped dripping every time I bent my arm past about 45 degrees. I bet you don’t know how often you bend your arm past 45 degrees. Yeah, I don’t know either. I just know I kept making that damn alarm go off. Now if I straightened my arm quickly enough the machine would start back up again without any assistance. But sometimes I didn’t make it into the magical space, so I’d have to call for someone to come in and reset the thing for me. I couldn’t go to the bathroom or leave my bed without someone coming in and helping me to unhook the IV unit so I could get past the foot of my bed. My roommate was more than confined to her bed, she was also cathatarized because of all of her issues. So … here we both were … two women confined to our beds. But here’s what I noticed. The nurses and techs would come into our rooms in the middle of the night and turn on the lights to do some thing that they needed to do. Now I understand that they very likely needed the lights to be on for whatever chore they were doing and I have no problem with that. But then, they’d leave the room and … LEAVE the LIGHTS ON. Just walk out. And we couldn’t do anything about it. Except call the station with a trivial complaint. Or walk into the room and leave without pulling the door to to keep the hall light out.

Interestingly, I did have two exceptions to this stunning array of efficiency. The nurse and tech who were on my case on Sunday morning were outstanding. They cared for me AND they were efficient. The tech came and took my vitals and asked me for the first time in two days if I’d like to bathe. Get clean? Wow, what a concept? I noticed that he asked my roommate as well. Then he helped her to do that very thing. Then he continued to unobtrusively check in on us more frequently during the morning than I’d seen any of the other techs during the entire time I’d been there. My nurse cared for me and mothered me … not in a smothering way, but in a way that conveyed her sense of caring and humanity. She smiled when she spoke to me and was kind. She was efficient, but not robotic.

By the way, the tech … he was Iranian. The nurse … from Ghana. Everyone else, American.

Increasingly, I’m finding in my own culture a focus on “the job.” We must “get the job done.” We have placed efficiency at the pinnacle of achievement in our society. Just how much can we squeeze into that manhour? Now let’s squeeze in some more. But what is the job of a hospital. Well, one would suppose it was to heal sick people. But not according to the experience I had this weekend. According to the experience I had, it is it keep the paperwork filled out properly. In every aspect of our lives there is paperwork which must be filled out properly. This has become so extensive that that filling out of paperwork becomes the job itself and people lose sight of what it is they’ve really signed up to do.

For instance, I’m pretty certain that every nurse who treated me went into nursing because she had a desire to treat sick people and bring them back to health. I equally sure that filling out paperwork had nothing to do her original desire. I would lay my last nickel on the fact that the nurse who was so busy filling out paperwork she couldn’t bring me my pain meds would be horrified if she were confronted with the reality of what she’d done. So, I’ve been ruminating as I relax in the tub about what has happened in our culture that allows us to treat people as cogs and stair steps underneath our feet? Why do we do this? It has become so ingrained in us that it is creating a culture of road rage, and Twinkie rage and all other sorts of rages. It has allowed us to dehumanize us to each other to the point where killing and maiming is just one more short step in some cases. I also know that this sense of dehumanizing has permeated the church allowing people to focus more on the task at hand than the people in front of them. I have no answers for this conundrum, just more to ruminate on.

…

Oh, and you can be thankful that I didn’t tell you the story of the physical therapist who came to help my roommate. The woman didn’t let a sentence go by where she didn’t say, “Praise the Lord,” or “God bless” … if I hadn’t been on so much anti-nausea meds, I might have thrown up. I did want to apologize to Roommate though for such a rude intrusion into her faith space.