The Grey Area of Inpatient Healthcare

Say cheese! 

Hospitals are odious places. Around every corner, air is sterile, cold, and masked by iodine tipping off from bottles of sanitizers installed like ominous reminders that the place, virally contractible, is plagued with death. Patients, who if weren't writhing in pain in their beds are but also set off in a coma, smell really bad. They smell like sh**t and look just as soiled. Their pallid faces bear the same sorry countenance as to being run over. By bad luck. It's the pantomime of anger, sorrow, disgust, and disappointment they wear on their faces with frowns, mouth agape, like the horde of actors from The Walking Dead, except they shouldn't be coming back undead afterward, because they're the rotting flesh that insults the very essence of the living. In the main, hospitals are sickly, dreadful, and completely- wait for it- inhospitable places.

To and fro, nurses, doctors, medical officers, therapists, and anyone else in a scrub busily attending procedures, or pretending to be are always typing, always walking, and always never around when you need them. They are busy people who have little time for poorly instrumented questions. Since emotional therapy would cost you, it would be more useful to arrive with a journalistic formula before your kin's doctor-in-charge. (WHOM am I speaking to? Oh, you're the neurosurgeon, WHY, I can barely tell by looking at your age. WHAT's the patient's condition now? I see, so WHEN do you reckon he'll ever wake again? Hold on, WHERE is the toilet? I need to pee. WHY is he not waking again? Dammit Doc, he owes me money!) How could one stand being around is a thought that needs reflecting. If one weren't choked up on tears from a dying relative, one would've been choked up on vomit from the wafting odor of death. Looking on- optimistically, if I may- it seemed that the only untouched area is the Starbucks a floor below, whose baristas don't quite fit in either because- I feel bad for saying this- hospitals are not the places to go for a cup of Joe. Joe's up there, hacking his last breath.

Of course, I didn't mean any of that. Hospitals save lives everyday, and I ought to be thankful- notwithstanding everything it has to do with dying.

When I was I little, I used to think of hospitals to be cool places to be seen in. In every sense of the word, computers, interiors, and mint-colored scrubs painted a picture parallel to the television dramas I watched at prime time reruns: Doctors with their stethoscopes, nurses with their mysterious surgical masks, and patients, ever crooning in pain, became a crux to the compelling arc that made hospital dramas so interesting to watch in the first place. Granted, I knew nothing about reality. My only impression of hospitals were misguided episodes of ER, accompanied by the roleplaying kit gifted to me by my parents who, pegged me if only someday to become a doctor, thought there could also be no better career than to look cool, save lives, and make promiscuous amounts of money doing it.

And then I grew up, witnessed a passing of a relative, and learnt the god-awful truth behind hospital facades, all-boasting a misconstrued heroism. More common than its televised drama, there is pain, with every life lost on hospital ground. For instance, my grandmother passed quickly by the time she needed intensive care, and following suit, as did my grandfather. It was heartbreaking. I watched healthily able people degenerate into human shells where its spirit slowly left them behind. I picked up early signs of the dying on their rotting flesh; turning rosy complexions into a sallow ugly color like the headstones they were gradually matching with. It was abhorring, gothic, and frightening with how seeing lively persons reduced to almost-corpses can change your early impressions of a place. Dominantly, hospitals became the territorial equivalent of the morgue. Such that if you're absolutely, positively needed on one of its beds because you can't sleep on any other right now, you might as well be dead.

We napped, lolled, and lazed in bed all day.

I say this because a couple of weeks ago, I thought another person in the family was going to die. A beloved of mine whom I respect, and, should she ever pass someday, would miss dearly, had a close shave with death. It was on a Sunday, half-an-hour before midnight, when my phone pinged a text from a cousin whom I barely ever talked with: "Are you at SGH (Singapore General Hospital)?" I was unsure, curious, and, yet- quite frankly- too tired to care. Dug deeper and found out that it was Godmom who had been hospitalised, a sleepy Sunday night then erupted into a frenzy of tears, panic, and unsolicited thoughts of death. Not that anyone can fully prepare himself or herself for it, but entertaining its possibilities will always set off the worrier. Like me, one never suspects dying to be abrupt, but absurdly easy.

To skimp on the details and get to the rub, Godmom was admitted to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) almost immediately after suspicions of a stroke were confirmed. She had a burst vessel in the brain, and was on her last leg if blood pressure readings didn't subside. Whereas the average human being should read below 120 and above 80 (120/80), Godmom was a gambler. Her bets were on 255. Abreast with standard procedures, the doctors then knew precisely how to act. They readied the scans, popped out the pills (that maintained the blood pressure), and steadied our twenty pax strong of kin with consolatory words and a hard truth: that if it's going to take a stroke to make some life changes, we better be prepared for it.

So for the past two weeks, I was a caregiver on duty. I was a bona fide nurse armed with an arsenal of wet wipes, talc, and a "Get Well Soon!" balloon for the sick. Godmom was in a state of stupor; her stroke-addled senses were retarded in speech and slowed down in movement. She could barely move, to say nothing of taking daily showers. Since saving her quickly, doctors were also confident that, though, she's out of the woods, with no physical impairment, her cognition still needs repair. With what came as a trauma to the left hemisphere, language processing has, thus, been affected. It may be hard to compute, but for a person who's as mathematical as any adept sales director of her own company, the arithmetic dysfunction will come as heartbreaking news. As for those life changes that I paced myself for, it included a new physical regime like easy exercises and routine short walks- don't sweat it- which will help improve her weakened right side of the body, shocked by the burst artery. (The brain has wondrous potential, according to a medical officer; it has capabilities to assume its weakened parts once it realises damage done to it.)

Wrap your mind around this: If a person who suffers a stroke does not receive immediate treatment, he, or she, may be physically, permanently handicapped. Or simply die. If there were no hospitals, no doctors, no fear of dying that edged us loved ones to our seats, 360-degree spin around, consequences of one would certainly throw us off, like a nosedive. A stroke patient needs care and support, in brief. And all I can finally think of is: "When can we get up, get out for that proper cup of coffee together again?"

As a matter of fact, I owe hospitals a buffet. They are efficient life-saving buoys that people cling onto everyday. One minute your arm's broken and the next a doctor has it already swathed up. If you've got a headache that over-the-counter pills can't get rid of, there's a scan ready by hall five that looks into your bitchin' migraine. And if it's an impending stroke, you're lucky to have found out this way. As gimmicky as that sounds, hospitals and its team staff do what they do best: save lives. The rest, as the word goes, is a weight I'm ready to bear on my shoulders.