What gets cut away
A few years ago, I had to have my gallbladder removed. Gallbladder disease. It runs in the family. Excruciating. The pain is awful. It really is.
The surgery was just a few weeks after I’d given birth to my second child, so I was already exhausted when it ruptured.
It was the middle of the night, maybe 2 or 3 AM…I can’t remember the exact hour. But I do remember going into the emergency room, talking to the receptionist, and then being told to take a seat. My husband insisted that we see someone, and she kept telling us to be patient. There were forms to fill out, other patients ahead of us, etc. It wasn’t until I threw up all over the floor in front of her desk that she actually took us seriously.
I was taken to a bed and didn’t wait long before a doctor came and examined me. I needed surgery. Right away.
They made all the necessary preparations so that man I’d never met could cut me open and take out an organ that… just a few hours earlier… I didn’t even know was killing me.
What struck me at the time wasn’t so much that I would lose a vital piece of my own body. It was the absolute disconnect between how you imagine the scene and what it actually looks and feels like. There was none of the glam that you see on television. None of the heroism. None of the humanity.
They wheeled me onto the elevator and took me down to one of the windowless floors below. For all intents, the operating room looked like a dungeon. Dim lighting, shelves filled with towels, and a large basin sink.
There were only about three people there, as far as I could see. One of the nurses put a ventilator over my face and asked me my name. Before I could answer, I woke up screaming in a different, but equally dreary, part of the hospital with a different, but equally dreary, nurse wiping me and speaking a foreign language. French.
I said “ow” in English, and I was sure that something was lost in translation because she ignored me and kept wiping. Then, a young orderly appeared and pricked me with something that made me feel instantly heavy and soothed and swirly. He wheeled me through a maze of hallways back to a private room (#canada).
I was there for 4 days. Maybe 5.
It’s a bit of a blur, but I can remember closing my eyes and sleeping for what seemed like weeks at a time when really, only a few minutes had passed. I remember that sometimes, the ticking of the second hand kept me from sleeping at all.
Laying in bed for so long weans you from all outside entertainment, so you have to find ways to keep yourself amused…like staring into the sun-soaked window and letting it burn your retinas ever so slightly so you can temporarily change the colours of all the inanimate objects in the room. What fun! Or having imaginary conversations with real people and saying everything you want to say to them, starting sentences with “you know what your problem is” and “here’s the thing about you.” Then sitting there feeling galled at some of the things they have the nerve to say back to you. Sometimes you’re mad at those people until you remember that the whole conversation took place inside your head.
You also pass the time watching all the comings and goings of the hospital staff and getting to know the nurses. I remember finding that some nurses had no business being nurses at all, while others were positively angelic.
And that was the other big thing that struck me — how insanely invaluable the nurses are and how…ahem…not so…the doctors are. From what I could tell, the doctors did very little, if anything, at all. I imagined them all being off in some restricted hallway where patients can’t find them talking about their favourite episodes of ER or something. Other than the occasional tricky surgery where they have to try and save a life or something, at the time, it seemed to me that their only responsibilities were to provide vague responses to very clear questions and break scheduling promises by being constantly and mysteriously unavailable.
It’s the nurses that truly care for the sick.
I was thinking about this the other day, and the often-repeated complaint that the hospital networks are embarrassingly inefficient and overwhelmed. (#canada). And there are many reasons for this, but one I’ve heard is that some people come to the emergency room when they don’t need urgent care. They just need to be cared for. They want someone to fuss over them, put a hand on their forehead, and give them medicine. And processing all these people takes time and money and cripples the system.
But does it have to?
As an adult, the nurturing relationships that sustained you as a child get cut away, whether surgically or by natural decay — and while you may not need urgent care, you could still need care, urgently.
It’s not medical attention, at least not always. It’s just simply care.
Having someone care for you and worry about you and validate your suffering. And maybe I’m alone in this opinion, but I feel like that’s a perfectly valid thing to want.
Can we give that to people? And what would that look like? I imagine a centre outside the hospital network filled with caregivers. Not necessarily nurses, but people with a small degree of the same type of training who provide a basic level of attention and concern while also serving as a filter for the real hospital network. We could call it the preventative medicine system. Maybe it already exists in some places. Maybe it would never fly… it’s just a thought. What do you think?