in the hospital
Being in the hospital is all about regression and being getting lots of excessive attention from the nurses and doctors. It's about walking around in a shapeless patient uniform most of the time, when you can walk, and having your sheets changed for you twice a day. For a short time I could not walk around and had to be pushed around by someone, who would always park me next to someone especially old and about to croak. It's also about being a bad fashion statement with tubes and medical tape and needles stuck into you and having to push around saline baggies. New appendages to your body are not so easily managed. Don't try to dance on when too many tubes are jammed into your arms. It's also about constantly drinking, drinking, eating, telling nurses when you shit, what your blood pressure is, what your temperature is.
Once I was good enough to walk again I was pretty happy and ran around the hospital corridors like a naughty little kid that I am, spying on all the people. Hospitals are weird gathering places for various cross sections of society. There are the confused relatives, perpetually lost and asking for directions, holding cellophane-wrapped bouquets of flowers and boxes of candy, dark circles under their eyes. There are the nurses who are a lot more laid-back than the doctors, maybe a little shell shocked from what they see all the time, always much prettier or more handsome once they strip off their uniforms and emerge in civilian wear.
The doctors have more of a stick up their ass and seem to be on a permanent authority kick, but you can't really blame them. Mine are surprisingly tender and it seems like everybody I meet has worked a year or two in New York and we joke about how they were worried about their English but that wasn't the big deal, it was Spanish, because anybody who is anybody knows that you only speak Spanish in Manhattan after a certain point.
My roommate is the portrait of perpetual suffernig. If she were catholic I bet she'd double as the Virgin Mary in all the season plays. She is a really sweet old lady, though. She can't understand why I like Berlin at all and reminisces about her short window of happiness, the time when she was married to an English soldier. "That's why I can speak English so well," she explains. "I used to live there, near Portsmouth. But then my husband died." She has so many health problems. She tells me that she will not have a boyfriend anymore because her second husband was so terrible, and she tells me that I must always take good care of my health. "You can't really buy good health. So always take care of yourself." Amen.
Stepping out onto the subway, into the real world again was exhilarating. I can do anything! i am healthy again! No more droopy hospital uniform. I feel good, I really am, and I love you all.
