What I Learned in Hospital
My roommate was dying but she showed me that strength can be found in vulnerability
Staying in hospital requires courage – and a good sense of humour.
In my friendship group alone, we shambled into 2019 with rotator cuff surgery, a hip replacement, complicated bone breaks, heart surgery, cancer, torn menisci and abdominal fissures. Multiply us by millions of over-60s, and you get the picture. We’re advancing through the system like a row of snowploughs on a fourlane highway. Traffic is slowing down for kilometres behind us.
A few months ago, I had my own experience with one of Toronto’s greatest hospitals, Mount Sinai. I won’t get into the ailment side of things – ouchywah-wah should cover it. Instead, I’m here to be your advance scout, to give you a first-hand account of the new frontier that awaits so many of us. It’s not a long journey as the Fitbit flies. Emotionally, though, the trek from good health to sudden-onset decrepitude is arduous and terrifying.
Sometimes at night when the hospital is quiet, thoughts rush in. Like, Am I going to die sooner than I thought? And, Why did I live the life I did, now that I’m too feeble to do things differently? If you’re lucky, you might meet someone during your hospital stay who helps you find the most eloquent answer to those questions without even realising they have.
Not everyone enters the hospital portal the same way. My sister drove me to emergency on a dusky December afternoon, where we took front-row seats facing the ferociously competent triage nurses. These nurses are the gatekeepers; they decide who gets through to the other side and how fast.
Like all good gatekeepers, the nurses start with a riddle. They repeated the same two instructions to all comers: take off your coat and get out your health card. Simple, right? No one got it right. Some people took off their coat halfway, then flapped their forearms like penguins, unable to reach their card. Others stared, stupefied. One man, 60-ish, fit and well-dressed, made the mistake of questioning the nurse’s instruction and stayed an extra two hours in the waiting room.
“I hurt my shoulder this morning so I’m afraid I can’t get my coat off.”
“How did you get your coat on if you can’t get it off?” the nurse asked. This flummoxed the man and also me but not my sister, Laura, a lawyer and nobody’s fool. “Good question,” she said, nodding.
Laura’s quick bond with triage took a careening left turn after we’d been
I’m sorry to dampen your peach-blossom optimism with a downer. But if you are cusping 60 and beyond, your likelihood of being admitted to hospital just got a whole lot higher.
admitted and she went looking for the health card I thought I’d left in triage.
“People always say they leave their health cards behind at triage and they are always wrong. Always,” said the triage nurse. She was angry. This was not good for my hospital future.
“I’m not blaming you. We’re simply trying to locate the card,” Laura said in her reasonable lawyer voice as I finally found it in the last unsearched pocket and flashed it to my sister behind the nurse’s ironing-board back. Laura seamlessly changed tacks: “But that’s good to know, nurse. We’ll have another look.”
While admitted patients waited for our beds, our cots lined the hallways like out-of-commission bumper cars. There it was blared into us that this was a place of danger. Code red! Code white! Ding, beep, help! Judy Garland could belt a tune to the clanging trolleys.
“A lot going on here,” said a big man waiting for his mother outside the bathroom door. My cot was across from the bathroom, a theme to be continued. “Yup,” I said.
My son, Kelly, replaced Laura. He was joined by Mary, my daughter, who chatted with a flirty orderly.
Mary: “Mount Sinai, isn’t it biblical?” Orderly: “It’s where that guy had the tablet and he handed it to the other guy.”
Mary: “The guy in the movie. What was his name?”
I Lazarused from my cot. “It’s where God gave Moses the Ten Commandments.”
At midnight a nurse rolled me into Room 1408, the semi-private I had all to myself and – double score – the window bed. It was sparkling clean and still, more like being in an enchantment than a room. I was on hydromorphone, true, but it seemed to make things more real rather than less.
I texted Laura at 2am: quiet! window! nice!
She texted back: perfect!
It was perfect. Who has a sister who texts back at 2am? I nodded off.
At 4am I texted Laura: someone moved in next door very loud old a moaner lights and noise
On the other side of the curtain everything clanked and everyone spoke loudly. “One, two, three, lift.”
On the other side of the curtain everything clanked and everyone spoke loudly. My new roommate moaned
The patient groaned. The nurse asked her if she would like the light left on. She replied, “Yes.” Yes?! It was 4.37am. I texted Laura to please bring earplugs and an eye mask. My cosy setup was leaking away.
At 6.30am, the doctor woke me up and asked me how I was feeling. Could they turn out the light, I wanted to know. I watched the doctor leave, thinking I might have asked bet ter quest ions, when a heavy-metal soundtrack started up just outside my room.
I wheeled my tubes a nd i nt ravenous f luids towards the sound. I looked like Ebenezer Scrooge on his third ghost of Christmas Eve. I faced the nurse (to be clear, she was not my nurse) tending the patient beside me, my new roommate, whom I did not look at.
“Nurse,” I began. “Someone is playing a boombox in that room across the hall.”
“The communal shower.” (The location of the communal shower was a trial throughout my visit, not only because of the music. I witnessed one too many naked behinds shuffling in and out. It’s a mystery to me why men walk around with the backs of their hospital gowns f lapping like the sails of a yacht.
“Nurse,” I repeated. “Someone is loudly playing a boombox in the communal shower right across from my room. At 6.30 in the morning. Could you please ask them to turn it off?”
What the nurse did next taught me something that, had I learned it 30 years ago, would have changed my life. She raised her hand, palm facing me, and paused. It was not aggressive, which was why it got my full attention, even over the Tommy gun of the communal boombox room.
“I cannot take on the shower music right now,” she said evenly. There was another pause as she made sure I was taking this in. “What I can do is close your door. Would you like me to close your door?”
“OK,” I answered meekly. As I went back to my bed I glanced at my roommate. She was small and I could see right away that her body didn’t work. There was no part of her that moved except her face, which was open, broad-browed and unlined as she smiled at me. I smiled back and texted Laura from my bed:
What the nurse did next taught me something that, had I learned it 30 years ago, would have changed my life
Afriend who had a diff icult Christmas wrote to me that she was focusing on the good, such as the kindness of one person, how nice her house had looked and the joyous fact that Christmas was now over. The bright side. My father was King of the Bright Side, never more than when he was in the hospital. I’d have been wise to pay more attention back then.
In his final years – he lived to a snappy 94 – Dad knew who ever yone was but not always where he was, which was often in the hospital, falls mostly. “Stood up too fast,” he’d say, stitches stapled into his head, when you arrived at emergency. His hospital cot posture was the same as his lounge-onthe-beach pose: legs crossed at the ankles, right hand under his head with elbow crooked, book held aloft in the other hand.
When emergency room nurses asked if he wanted anything, he’d say, “Why yes, I’ll have a glass of white wine, please.” They thought he was cracking a joke but he thought he was in his living room. When he did remember he was in the hospital, it was the best hospital he had ever seen. “You’ll never know a greater bunch of nurses.” And “This doctor is the smartest doctor you’ll ever meet.” His good manners weren’t a ploy, simply the way he behaved towards strangers and family, both the same. When a patient was rude, he’d look away. “I don’t go in for that nonsense.”
What I’d forgotten until I landed in the hospital was that he’d had a lot of experience in getting it right. Not many make it to their 90s without heavy-duty medical assistance, and no amount of spinning classes is going to make us much different from our parents. Laura and I counted at least six major surgeries for our father in his 60s and 70s, although neither of us could recal l much about his illnesses or recoveries, or even visiting him in those years when he stopped being invincible.
In our shoddy defence, he had the recovery speed of the Road Runner on a tar road. He also found the fortitude to accept that his spirit remained willing but his body did not, and he looked for new places to put his undaunted energy. He gave up skiing but started flying, taking to the air as if he’d never left the air force. “I’m going to take you all up! Grandkids, too!” We were terrified – by now he was 83 – but the f lying thrilled
My father was king of the bright side, never more than when he was in hospital. I’d have been wise to pay more attention
him. “Up there with the birds,” was one of the last things he said.
“NEIGHBOUR?”
I paused. I was writing a furious response to an incomprehensible email and didn’t want to interrupt my ragetrain of thought.
“Neighbour?” Her voice was very faint, but there was no mistaking it this time. “Hello?” I said. “Hello, neighbour. Can you buzz the nurse for me?”
“Of cou r s e.” I buzzed; no one came. This was unusual – the nurses were on pagers and responded with immediate and skilled attention to any need. I buzzed again and again, for half an hour, in between writing my furious email.
“I think it must be a shift change,” I said to the drawn curtain.
“That’s okay,” the woman whispered. She made a soft cry, which was drowned out by a sudden beeping coming from my intravenous. I read the words repeating on the ticker stream – AIR IN LINE – and I’m sorry to say it was this and not my roommate that got me out of bed.
I once again wheeled the tubes and fluid sacks dangling from my metal pole, this time to the nurses’ station halfway down the hallway. There I calmly held my palm, face out, in the air in front of me. Everyone fell silent and looked at me, attentive and waiting. The Power of the Palm!
“My roommate needs your assistance,” I said, calm as a pond – did I mention my hydromorphone had been topped up? To underline my point, I opened my hand to show five separate fingers for the five times I had buzzed. It was a nice flourish but not a wise one. Now the nurses looked angry. “Five times!” I repeated, too loud. “And I may be about to die from an air bubble.” My nurse sternly ordered me back to bed where he took my vitals, which had rocketed. “See what you have done?” he said, sadly.
My neighbour got the help she needed, though, and we exchanged names (Cheryl, Cathrin), got tucked in – lights out this time – and were given melatonin to help us sleep. Seriously, we were given melatonin. It wouldn’t knock out a canary. I managed not to say this out loud.
About 4am I began to weep quietly. Puny sorrows amplify in a hospital bed in the single-digit hours, and my happily haphazard life seemed to have taken a new, darker direction, and not one I had chosen. It wasn’t fair.
Cheryl made a soft cry, which was drowned out by a sudden beeping coming from my intravenous machine
“Cathrin, are you OK?”
I wiped my runny nose on my sheet.
“Yes.”
“Do you know how you got here?” It was a profoundly timed question from the other side of the curtain.
“Oh, you mean literally? I walked into emergency. Do you know how you got here?”
“No. It gets confusing sometimes. How’s the view?”
Cheryl told me she was 65. I said truthfully she looked 20 years younger. She studied animation at Sheridan College when it was the hottest place to do that, and had lived on Brunswick Avenue a few blocks away from where I live now. She moved to Los Angeles, where she worked for seven years as an animator until she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, which she has had for 27 years. She moved back to Toronto and in with her mother, who was now deceased. “Tell me about your mother.” “I can’t,” Cheryl said. “It’s too dark.” It was an extraordinarily slow conversation. Our words didn’t go through the curtain so much as drift up and over it before waterfalling down the other side. Every syllable of Cheryl’s was an effort, and she often had to repeat herself over the hum of my intravenous machine.
Sometimes when it got too hard I did the talking for both of us, or we’d stop for a while, then start up again. She was a great cook, or had been, and enjoyed a good meal, not to be found in a hospital. She especially liked sweets. She lived alone in assisted care, where she was visited by a caregiver three times a day.
“Are you in pain, Cheryl?” There was a pause so long I thought she might have fallen asleep.
“No,” she finally answered, and then she paused again. “I don’t need to ask if you are in pain because I can tell that you are.” I have never been so graciously schooled.
“I don’t think that melatonin is all it’s cracked up to be,” she said. It was
5am and I could see the first outline of the city skyscape through our window.
“No kidding.” There was another pause. “Is there anything I can do for you, Cheryl?”
“Yes,” Cheryl said. “I’d like to know how I got here.”
Three days in, the doctor said I could have a couple of saltine crackers, and the nurse said they’d have to special- order them. “Let’s do that,” he said. “Under the heading #ridiculous.”
Cher yl began to order salt ines for me with each of her meals but they never came. This dist ressed both of us until a friend arrived wit h two massive red boxes of Premium Plus Saltines, one salted and one unsalted, “I wasn’t sure which you liked best.”
“I like your friends,” Cheryl said a bit later. “They’re nice.”
In the five days I shared Room 1408 with Cheryl, people brought me many kind gifts, including the warmth and comfort of their company. Most nights I fell asleep to the sound of my son softly typing on his computer. In the afternoon I’d doze off to Laura and Mary talking about the latest fashion in winter coats or catching up on what the cousins were doing.
Cheryl didn’t have visitors, and neither of us mentioned this. I texted my sister:
bring Cheryl your leftover banana bread
Cheryl was discharged a day before me. “Do you have a good doctor?” I wanted to know. I was sitting on the end of her bed nibbling a piece of banana bread.
“He’s young and handsome, so yes, he’s good.
“Sometimes I think about death,” she said.
“You’re not there yet.”
“Pretty close.” The bustle of preparation, followed by the long wait for the paramedics who would move Cheryl, was unsettling. In a panic, she asked for emergency services. It didn’t last long, but she was embarrassed. “I’m useless,” she told her nurse. “You are not useless,” the nurse began. “It’s true you can’t use your body. But you have a heart and a mind and you use both of them. In just a few days you’ve made friends with me and you’ve made friends with Cathrin.
“I’ll tell you what’s useless,” the nurse continued. “Useless is people who have a body, mind and heart and don’t use any of them.”
Cheryl was wheeled away smiling by two tall and handsome young
“You’re not useless. You can’t use your body, but you have a heart and a mind, and you use both of them”
paramedics. We’d exchanged phone numbers, although it was a mystery to me how she could make or receive calls.
“The city is full of Cheryls,” said Dr Jean Marmoreo gently. She told me not to underestimate what our new friendship could mean to Cheryl’s spirits, and I took it to heart. I had it all backwards, but I didn’t know that yet.
That afternoon I lay on my bed with my arm crooked under my head, my ankles crossed. I was wearing the checked pyjamas Laura had bought me, with contrasting striped socks. I’d even washed my hair in the communal shower room. I knew my nurses by name, and I’ve never met such terrific men and women.
Laura had sussed out the best bathroom for visitors (“The woman who showed it to me said she would have to kill me if I told anyone”), and I patrolled the hallways noting how female patients seemed to have figured out the trick of wearing two gowns, one strings-front and the other strings-back, so solving the backside problem.
I went home with renewed hope in a few things, such as that men might solve the hospital gown conundrum. Also that being vincible is another way forward. The only way, even. And that paying attention to the plight of our neighbours is as much our salvation as it is theirs.
BY THE TIME I VISITED CHERYL a couple of weeks later, she had been sent back to another hospital, this time to the ICU. She had a sunny corner room with two sides of windows and her own nurse stationed outside the door. She was as pretty as ever, and her brown wavy hair had been washed and put in a soft bun.
She did not talk or open her eyes, so I did the talking for both of us. Nothing important, not like what she had shown me about courage, grace and gratitude. And that love can be as simple as a slow conversation at night through a drawn curtain.
Cheryl died peacefully the next morning, with two friends beside her. I wish I’d remembered to tell her how she got to Mount Sinai – it was by ambulance – because it was the only thing she’d asked of me.