Ate It Anyway

A Lover's Guide to Hospitals

a lover's guide to hospitals In my oldest fantasy, everythingis perfect after the giant bicycle accident. My friends and I clench our teeth as if imitating sharks,all our appendixes ruptured, such a crowd of us that they have had to call a second ambulance. The pain weighs us down on our stretchers as cleanly as a bag of sand. We are all injured, a good strong word from TheAdventures ofRin Tin Tin, as we drift in white vehiclestoward the great white floodlit face of the hospital. I suppose that now,supported bymybarelysufficient graduate student insurance, I'm the closest I'll ever come to that fantasy. But unlike the structures I used to dream about, grand hospitals 96 with their square and dignified faces looking out over districts of residential greenery,this isjust a community hospital, set like a pumping station against the riverbank, windows sealed against this valley's moist heat. The pain I feel is something awkward, off balance, tilting toward nausea, something I can't quite get the rest of my body around. Its drug-dulled, destabilized ache is almost lost beneath the continuing swoon of relief that came with what Iwastold this afternoon—that I still have two testicles and havebeen delivered of merely a benign cyst. In the old dream that I loved so much, we waved back and forth betweenambulances. Iwould liketo do something likethat now, but there's nobody to wave to, and I don't feel well enough. When you love hospitals as much as I do, it's easy to forget that the reason we go into them usually spoils the luxurious emptiness of the time we spend there. Even the shapes of the nurses seem harsh in their bleached white.It has been said that youth is wasted on the young; I guessyou could sayhospitals are wasted on the sick. But I have had a second piece of good news:I actually know one of the nurses here. We worked together in the Buckeye Lounge when she was still a medical student. Still—that's the important word, for in a town like ours, the law requires that even a strongly ambitious woman dramatically lower her career goals, so as to keep them more in line with those ofwhatever local carpenter or tinsmith such a woman invariably marries. I like to put things in terms of laws and theories, because in a valley full of those people whose cars and trucks surround this sealed capsule of a hospital, I can talk to myself knowing that if they heard me they would never understand aword. So Leslie dropped out of medical school (you could say it "came to pass") because she was in love with a gentle, generic, cigarette-smoking fashioner of gentle porcelain objects and so a lover's guide to hospitals 97 became a nurse instead, for which I haveno right to criticizeher, which brought her here, to the only hospital in town. And as long as I have all this time to fantasize, I might as well think about my other favorite fantasy nurse—Nurse Danko of The Rookies, KateJackson's first prime-time role. Nurse Danko was that Platonic nurse construct of which real nurses are but shadows on a cave wall. Every time someone got injured (and manywere injured but fewkilled in those kind and violent seventies ), he always ended up in Nurse Danko's hospital, and Nurse Danko was always on duty and was alwayshis nurse. It is significant to me that Leslie looks more than a little like Nurse Danko—the same dark hair, the same keen face, precise without being prim, soft without being sentimental. Lacking Kate Jackson's on-set stylist to comb her out between takes, Leslie had to opt, in the Buckeye Lounge at least, for a single short pigtail. What I love about the hospital is that except for during visiting hours, it's an area free of people in pickup trucks. Even the janitors don't have them. I can't think of another place to better shut yourself away from such people—though I know I'm not being fair—from their mindless good luck, away from that sensibility that understands nothing but has a bumper sticker for everything.I love that the windows don't open, that a truck with abad exhaust system can climb the hill on the other side of...