Salutations!

This is my Blogproject. Sit down, stay awhile. Feed the fish, and read some art.
If you like what you see or have any questions or critiques, please let me know.
Yours, Truly.

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Hospitals

You scare me.

It could be the smells... The rubbing alcohol and floor cleaner with overtures of too many unhappy faces... and the occasional whiff of vomit. When I get a needle, or a new medication in my IV, I can smell it, no matter how many times your minions tell me I'm imagining it. In the emergency waiting room I smell fear. Tears and sweat and utter despair. 40 people in front of me having their worst day, and the smell follows me.

And the worst of all is the sickly sweet and insidious smell of the rubber when you come to try 50 times to take my blood. It smells like vanilla that has been run over by a burning truck tire... and my blood smells like salt and batteries.

Maybe it's the memories I have of being trapped within your countless walls-- memories that still haunt my sleep. I wake up already sobbing and short of breath saying "don't make me go, don't you dare make me get better".
But it was never the getting better that was the problem.
It was the endless waiting, the excruciating pain and the days (to weeks) without food that come with getting better that make me afraid to go back. Make me afraid to be sick. But worse than that, afraid (once I'm sick) to start getting better...

It could be the tiny boxes that you try to put us in.... Your consumers seem to have come to be Zoo animals for a day. In a cage with no walls, open to the air. Open to the eyes-- staring, questioning, curious. The one time you want to suffer in silence, in secret; you look your worst on purpose but the gawkers won't take a hint. You become a stuffed owl for the masses of other sick people and hospital employees.

Maybe it's just the opposite.
Not that there are too many stories, eyes, smells--- but that within the midst of hundreds of people, you are the loneliest place I can think of....


Yours, Truly