A world of (health) care

I discovered that while spending a few days in the hospital, as I did recently for a troublesome bile duct blockage and infection, your world is suddenly condensed.

There's plenty of time for television, of course. And reading.

And pondering.

But beyond that, you'll probably see immediate family members, the occasional doctor or PA making the rounds, and plenty of nurses.

Oh, my. The nurses. It seemed as if I had an entire platoon of RNs looking after me, all of them attentive, all of them pleasant. I'll never remember all of their names.

The one nurse that I will remember, though, is Thomisha. Her 12-hour shifts during my stay seemed to cover me more than the others, including deep into the nights.

One night, probably her last full shift with me before my discharge, I apologized for calling her to my room to unhook me from my IV tree so I could pad my way into the restroom and pee. You pee a lot when taking IVs. You also pee a lot when you are a man in your 70s. I think it's God's little joke on men.

"You're no trouble at all," said Thomisha, an African-American woman who said she has three other jobs besides this one. "I'm lucky because I have good patients on my shift now."

That got me to thinking...

"So does that mean you have some patients who resist everything you try to do for them?"

She stopped what she was doing. She looked at me.

"You have no idea."

Then came a quiet moment that lasted just seconds but was profoundly heavy by what was not spoken. I don't think I was misconstruing her intent. I know nurses sometimes have problem patients. But this, this was very different. She was coming from a world I'll never know. A world I might never understand, or even could.

"You have no idea," she repeated. "Sometimes it makes me wonder why I even do this job."

A few hours later, I was ready to be discharged. All of my nurses have been great, even going back a few years ago to when I had colon surgery, and then later when I had gall bladder surgery. They do jobs I can't comprehend doing. They do grunt work that can be repulsive or uplifting. They deal with the obnoxious and the obvious, as well as the helpless and the needy and the confused. They deal with blood, feces and urine.

They don't need to carry anybody's extra baggage. I'll let you make your own way through my otherwise unspoken moment here.

Thank you, Thomisha. Thank you so much. You'll just never know how much.

•   •   •

My entire hospital stay turned out to be universal. I guess it's because hospitals are universal.

In addition to African-Americans and Caucasians attending to little ol' me, there was an Asian helping with my MRI, an Hispanic with my procedure to remove the stones, with the actual endoscopy performed by a person of Mediterranean descent. I thought my radiologist came from Germany because of her accent, but then she told me she was from Ukraine. Oh, my. And my CT scan was conducted by a hippie with wild, long hair and laid-back personality. We hit it off immediately.

Look, I'll still do anything to avoid going to the hospital. But my world of health care has been phenomenal.

 And I am eternally grateful.