A Mile in my All Stars

Hospitals

Welcome to my life

Here I am again, walking around in the dark outside of a hospital. For me, this is almost home.

When I was two, my mother married my stepfather. There's lots more to that story, and maybe I'll even tell it some day. My stepfather had only one lung. One had been removed when he was 19 years old, due to an infection that was started, so the story goes, by him snorting a peanut up his nose. I'm sure there's a lot more to that story, but that's all I know of it.

Much of my childhood was spent riding in the backseat of a speeding sedan as my mother drove my stepfather to the emergency room because he could not breathe. He was diagnosed with a lung disease that, at that time, only 14 people in the world happened to have. As far back as I can really remember, I was told about once a year by some well meaning adult that Daddy was going to die. Winters were invariably given over to pneumonia. I spent much of my childhood in ER waiting rooms, ICU waiting rooms, and then the hospital floor waiting rooms - as back then children were not welcome in a hospital room.

I was a quiet child, given to sitting quietly in a corner with a sketchpad, or a book. I've grown into a quiet adult, given to sitting in a corner with a sketchpad or a book.

However, I've always also been restless. When my stepfather was in the hospital I was the gofer. I went for coffee, pop, or cigarettes. Remember when you could actually buy them from a machine that was standing with all the other vending machines? Well, I guess that dates me, huh? At that time, you could even smoke in the hospital waiting room. ICU waiting rooms, especially, tended to be filled with smoke - every single person there with a cigarette.

Both of my parents smoked. They quit eventually, I don't recall exactly when. But this is why my Mother always told me she could not tell me not to smoke - she couldn't tell me not to do anything she did. My stepfather took the other tactic - he gave me a cigarette when I was three or four years old and taught me to inhale. I thought - YUCK - and that was it until I was about 14.

Anyway - because I wanted to go somewhere, anywhere, I would learn my way around every hospital. I learned where the vending machines were, what was in the gift shop and their hours, where to find X-ray and ER, ICU, and surgery. The adults soon learned to ask me how to get to a room or a destination,and I could tell them, or show them, or go for them. Sometimes I just walked around the hospital, for something to do outside of that waiting room.

I was normally in the waiting room more or less alone as my mother would stay with my stepfather. I learned early on that you really need someone there with the patient, to make sure they were cared for, the IVs monitored, the monitors monitored, the right drugs given at the right time and nothing done that was not supposed to be done. I listened to her bitch about rude, mean, or lazy nurses, and the problems coping with the half a dozen specialist doctors involved in my stepfather's case.

When I was 12 my mother learned about the Candy Striper volunteer program at the hospital and decided I should volunteer through the summer. Because I really had not had enough time in hospitals, right? Looking at the choices, I couldn't see myself reading or emptying bedpans, so I chose to be a volunteer for the lab. It was kind of fun - and boring both. Most of the time I sat around, but once every hour I got to take the basket and go to every nurses station on every floor and pick up all of the samples for testing - blood, urine, stools, and the paperwork. Sitting in the lab office listening to the techs I learned how little they cared, how often tests got mixed up or lost completely.

When I was 14 my step father finally died, and I started smoking. Someone simply handed me a cigarette in the waiting room, and that time I smoked it. I bought my first pack for myself a few days later - and my mother grudgingly paid for it. Not only that, but took to asking if I needed smokes if she was going to the store. Between the last hospital stay, the funeral, and all the crazyness associated with that, I needed something to calm myself down.