My earliest recollection of any hospital was when I was about 3 or 4 years old. My father was hospitalized for diabetes. The only thing I really remember are his awful pajamas. I don't have earlier memories of what he slept in, but I don't think they were pajamas. These were NEW ... for his hospital stay ... and they were UGLY -- some sort of orange paisley on white. I think he kept them for years after that, to be a good steward of the pajamas. Maybe that's how I recall them. Nonetheless, that is my first memory of a hospital. Not long after that I recall waving to my Grandpa from the hospital parking lot and talking to him over an old, blue walkie-talkie. I think that was when I first got a semblance of the gravity of a hospitalization. He wasn't well enough for us to visit with him face to face ... he was up there -- isolated -- and sick. Thankfully, Grandpa lived for many, many years following that heart attack. Somehow we knew that he was on blood thinners and couldn't go home until he "made water." These memories are somewhat amusing now, as an adult ... but we understood the hospital as a daunting place, even as children. At least I did. I was really little.
The next time I found myself in a hospital was after my grandmother had had both aortic and femoral artery transplants. She had come home, but returned to the local hospital with complications of some sort. I don't know how old I was -- maybe junior high or a freshman in high school ... but I knew that it was serious when they rolled her onto her side and her whole back was black from internal bleeding. My beloved grandmother ... so frighteningly ill. She did recover from that ordeal ... to face breast cancer and even then, many more years of loving living. Thus far, my hospital experiences had resolved with recovery -- healing -- living. Many years later, she died in a different hospital -- just a few hours after a sister had finally arrived on emergency leave from Saudi and we had all gone home for the evening. I was carrying my son -- newly pregnant. She died not knowing that I would bear my father's first grandson, something she very much anticipated (she called my daughter "Buster" up until the day she was born -- the seventh girl in a row).
I spent a night in the hospital in college -- winter break, probably. I had my wisdom teeth removed. I had an unfavorable first IV experience and remember flashing my brother-in-law my behind, showing him where I got the shot that made me stoned enough to show him my behind.
My last memories of my mother were of her birthday -- where we all gathered around her and celebrated her beautiful life -- and then not quite two weeks later of her awkward embarrassment telling us of how they had to shave her entire body to prepare her for surgery -- and how she was yellow from a coating of betadine. She was a little high from her pre-op drugs, so we were all sort of "light," but then the dreams came upon me in the surgical waiting room. It was May, so I had brought notes and books to study for finals, but just slept instead -- until my dreams woke me with dread. And my worst fears were met: her heart would not beat. The last time I saw my mother, she was on a heart-lung machine. Of course we truly believed that she had heard our assurances of love by squeezing our hands, but now, as an adult -- I know that was only in our hopeful minds. She had pretty much already died. The unheard of, tragic death of my mother changed me forever. I was 19 -- on the cusp of young adulthood and being teenaged. "Motherless Daughters," a book by Hope Edelman, explains so succinctly how I suffered from being both. Gone was the carefree girl who made music, created recipes, designed clothes ... replaced by a more serious young woman who worked hard to continue in her own vein. It reminds me of "This little light of mine" ... hidden under a bushel. Somehow I finished college and graduated with honors. My senior year, I fell in love with David. He saved me from grief. He loved me like I had never been loved. Joy returned to my being.
My dad had a stroke my first year out of college. I remember everything about that night -- including distracting him from my sister, whom I was desperately coaxing to call an ambulance, probably scared myself to do it because he was adamantly forbidding it. I remember driving to the hospital that night -- probably in a panic -- but I don't remember anything else about that event. Weird. Just a few weeks later, David and I had a serious car accident in freezing rain. I remember only hearing the activity in the ER as they discussed my condition and cut off my clothes -- and later waking in the ICU to the concerned faces of a sister and my father. I stayed there for a week, suffering from a concussion and fractured pelvis. We were really having some fun!
My next significant hospital experience was the birth of my daughter. It was not an easy delivery -- I endured 26 hours of labor, which failed to progress ... but I was finally rewarded with the most beautiful creature I have ever been blessed to behold -- still, to this day. My own hospital experience was less than stellar. It was a holiday weekend and they pretty much starved me, ignored and betrayed my birth plan, barely gave me any care at all, added insult to injury by surprising me with a measles shot (again, in the behind) and then sent me home, barely able to walk, and with a very fussy baby. Nonethless, I had the prize in my arms (all day and night, it seemed). My son was born 20 months later -- after only 23 hours of labor! and a little bit better experience all-around. I was no longer a new mother, but one who was willing to thumb my nose at the nurses and do what I wanted with my own baby, who was most content just to cozily laze in my arms. That hospital did not allow "rooming in," so I had to figure a way around that ... and I did. Ha. That was my first taste of a rebellious nature, and it was really quite satisfying.
A year and a half later, my father died in yet another Pennsylvania hospital. We had just spent Thanksgiving with him and I knew he was not well. I feared that he was dying. He firmly sent me home. To this day, I believe that he did not want me to be there for what was coming. I believe that he lovingly spared me from another hospital death. Not quite a year later, I was in the ER again -- with my baby boy on my hip listening to a doctor tell me about my husband's brain tumor. I remember feeling a paralysis spread down my lower back and I was unable to move as he described microscopic "tentacles" reaching out from the tumor into the brain tissue. I looked at the CT scan then back at him and said, "You can't remove that." Moments later, I was chasing David's gurney upon which he was strapped, paralyzed and intubated for a helicopter flight to a Northern Virginia hospital for emergency brain surgery. I had predicted this one, too and, again, I couldn't even say good bye.
My goodness....so many losses too soon. You are indeed a very strong woman.
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