I always figured I’d be a good hospital customer, what with my tendency to make the most of any situation, my ability to entertain and occupy myself, and my patience. But today I confess myself a licked man. I don’t think I could have taken another day in that world. My goodwill goes out to all I left behind there and in hospitals everywhere.

Throughout that ten day venture, my dad never seemed far away, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father lurking about. The spirit of good-natured, joking Dad went into gear in my interactions with the personnel most of the time. As far as I can tell, I’m actually pretty good at hospital banter— better than some would imagine. But it seemed more like him than me. All the while, though, confused, frightened, paranoid, angry Dad was prepared at any moment to step in and say, “Okay, I’ll take it from here, thank you.” 

It makes me think of the first time I ventured to take the adult role with him. It was the start of a road trip in Iowa and there was a mix up at the car rental place. He was getting angry with the clerk. "Now, don't get your dander up," I remarked. He found the turn of phrase amusing enough to defuse and distract him.

This Dad never emerged, but I knew he was at the vicinity of my elbow. This was the Dad of his final couple of years— losing his grip on reality. And that’s what interests me most in this little musing— one’s grip on reality, and how a hospital stay brings one to the very edges.

It’s as if when I was broken open and given a new aortic valve and stem, I was a new construction of Dr. Frankenstein’s, foisted upon the world. I had to start from scratch, and I’m talking about my grip on reality at the most basic level.

Our most basic sense of reality starts with our bodies. What this recent experience brought home to me is how even in the most normal situations, that knowledge is more metaphorical and less a one on one correspondence with phenomena than we usually realize. We form mental images of what’s going on with our bodies— yet it goes beyond mere visual imagery. It’s certainly not literal imagery.

For instance, there’s breathing. We breathe, and we also conceive of our breathing. For those of us seeming to start from scratch on this mental conception and living for long stretches in a semi-conscious state— as I’m guessing most hospital stays entail—  the whole program of breathing is novel and inscrutable. I found myself assuming one goes through several pairs of lungs every day, and not necessarily one’s own. One set may feel congested. Another may feel fine. Another feels just somehow out of whack, not aligned with the rest of the body to function at full capacity. Purpose of it all: unknown, but I seem to exist for it as much as it exists for me.

Sleep too is a puzzler. What’s the agenda there? What is it? Here’s a construct I tried out: sleep is a group of adjoining units that are like pillows--  squarish pillows resembling the small houses in the neighborhood I could see from the hospital window. My agenda was to acquire bits of this real estate, whatever it was. This took some real work. Of course, there are the interruptions from those room invaders. Why let the customer sleep when you could find out things about them, like how much they weigh? But when the coast is clear and one could be sleeping but isn’t, what’s the next move?  A literal move of the body? This poses a lot of further questions. Will this poor excuse for an item of clothing I’m wearing make the move with me? If not, those snaps will unsnap and I will be disrobing to a state even more disrobed-feeling than usual and this without remedy. What about all my attachments and lines? Will they get snagged? Will I set off something in the nerve center and will a disembodied voice ask me, “Is there something you need?” It happens. What about adjustment by adjusting the bed? That’s one move easy to take back. It requires the least amount of commitment. But the blankets and sheets are another matter. They will definitely come with you. But you want them to stay put. It’s already difficult enough to tell what they are doing. The tugs here and there never product the hoped-for result. Will this move hurt? If so, in a temporary way, or will I come to real harm? Will there be the slightest improvement of my prospects? It’s enough to cause a man to repose in tensed indecision for a half an hour. Or just give it all up in the middle of the night. 

So one can try TV. 

I had some interesting viewing at the hospital. One afternoon I sat through the entirety of Bad Day at Black Rock, which I hadn’t known about before. It’s has remarkable performances and dialog and a surreal setting. I’m glad I saw it, but given one’s susceptible state, movies have a stronger impact in the hospital experience. This is neither good nor bad, but it all becomes part of the reconstructing reality soup.

I’m not sure I should have watched Pandora’s Box in the wee small hours of the morning. It’s not a favorite, but I am a silent film buff. As a youth I liked the feeling a silent film has in the night— all dreamy. Fine for youths, but senior citizens in hospitals not so much.

Or there is staring out the window in the wee small hours. I found myself gazing down at the parking lot of the Safeway at Logan and Jefferson, wondering if someone was going to make a middle-of- the- night food run. I knew the store was probably closed, but I didn’t know for certain, so it was a Waiting for Godot experience— very lonely and sad.

I used to get my groceries there— and also at it’s previous location a couple of blocks north of there.

That’s another element to throw into the mix. Staying at Swedish Hospital was as much like coming home as any hospital stay could possibly be. This used to be my neighborhood. It was my block, in fact. I lived on the second floor of a little old medical clinic in a studio apartment across the street. In those days, if I looked out my front window I could watch my current environment being built— recently current. I could hear it built whether I wanted or not.

Fast forward to the current year and I found myself looking down— not on my former dwelling, but on a big, unoccupied structure, as mysterious as the Borg cube. Only one floor has any lighting, allowing a look at what appear to be cubicles with sinks. Nobody appears here either.

I had a view of Logan Avenue and Englewood High. I used to walk up the former to go to a church which met at the latter.

This is another consideration for one’s grip on reality. How does what I’m doing now relate to the past and future? Which elements are ongoing? Which have an end? One feels like the child who didn’t know much about Halloween who now experiences trick or treat for the first time. Is this something we’ll be doing tomorrow night also?

In the day to day of life, one’s adult self can come alongside the temporarily disoriented self and explain, no, we won’t do that tomorrow. But tomorrow we do need to start this other thing. A bit later we have to repeat something we did last week. That adult self is nowhere to be found a great deal of the time for the grip on reality project. One’s job is to be the trusting, obedient, vulnerable child anyway.

There is an endless parade of explaining, coming-alongside adults. But somehow they don’t have the answers to the basic issues of the soul and you wouldn’t even know how to ask.

They often just appear like apparitions.

One evening, a doctor and her male colleague appeared. Her confident bearing was such that I concluded she was the doctor behind the doctors, the unifying principle of it all. She was the Dumbledore of doctors. Any minute she was going to say, “We’ve been following your case with great interest, Mr. Potter,” only she’d say “Mr. Thurston.” What tipped it off that she was in fact my sister under that mask was her suspiciously extensive knowledge of my children. Even this I was willing to chalk up to the kind of homework a crack doctor of doctors does. Perhaps it was that in combination with something else that tipped me off. But one tweaks one’s sense of reality as needed and as frequently as needed. There wasn’t the slightest bump in that road.

Well the room was dim, and I had been napping.

Pain, of course, comes to bear in bringing one to these frontiers. I only had one morning of real pain. I spent much of it singing Christmas carols aloud to cope while there was some bureaucratic holdup to a substance that could relieve me. 

At some point I contemplated a conversation that would begin, “What are your plans for today?”

Answer: “I plan to occupy time and space.”

Might there be choices about the very nature of doing that, even before one gets to any details? What I have in mind is hard to explain but I’m talking about a level of existence and choices akin to the choice Dad used to encourage his passengers to make when he drove them over high mountain passes. “Don’t put your full weight down,” he would tell us. Well, it seems like you should indeed be able to make that decision.

At any rate, a hospital stay makes one realize the project of occupying time and space is a very strange one, not easily grasped. Does one really have to put one's full weight down, for instance? One’s usual working mental constructs telling one how to proceed are just that— things that work in much of everyday life, but which are inadequate for a great deal. It makes me realize what I usually take for the workings of faith are mental props and scaffolding of faith, not the thing itself. Some actual, non-theoretical building up of oneself in the faith is required. (Jude 1:20) Easy to say.