Bubble Gum and Bailing Wire

Today is August 16th. My son has been home from the hospital for a week, and I’m just starting to feel secure enough about his ability to stay out of the hospital to begin looking around and the life I let drop over a month ago (well, the pretense I had of still having a life when a loved one is seriously ill. Those who’ve been in there will know what I mean), wondering how to put it all back together. The pieces are laid about, willy-nilly — no matter how good I am with glue and paste, it’s going to look like a collage. The seams and frayed edges are going to show. Catastrophe survivors, refugees, families of the long-term hospitalized — in the aftermath, we all share that “barely just put back together” feeling — as well as the glazed look in our eyes as we look over the remnants of what has been, trying to make sense of it.

As energy and interest in the world outside that sterilized hospital zone returns, I’ve been grappling with how to tell about what happened, how to show others the inherent insanity in medicine as it’s practiced today. There has been insufficient time to get enough perspective on it. It’s too recent, and there are the remnants of it still around me every day — the home IV pump with its twice-daily doses of antibiotic (at $1000 a dose), the portable wound VAC unit ($20,000+ unit that is smaller than most women’s purses), the bags and boxes of supplies I still haven’t found anyplace to stow. All constant reminders of something I’d much prefer to forget, keeping those experiences too fresh for the healing that only relating them can provide.

Lo and behold, Benedict Carey at The New York Times steps up with an illuminating article about modern hospitalization. It isn’t my personal nightmare, but it does expose some of the most horrifying aspects of being hospitalized in this country — even in the good ones. The article’s entitled “Being a Patient: In the Hospital, a Degrading Shift From Person to Patient.” Until I can draw a breath that is free of the taint of modern western medicine, it’s the best I can do to provide a glimpse into the many ways that terrorism is actually institutionalized in this country.

(Others would include, or so I am told, being audited by the IRS, getting off the Transportation Safety Administration’s “no fly” list, and running for any major political office in this country.)

In the interim, I find I am also examining this blog carefully, weighing its importance and/or usefulness, considering what to do with it next. Is it really necessary to have yet another liberally-slanted blog for review, commentary and opinion? Do the low readership and discussion levels indicate that this blog hasn’t really discovered its true purpose yet? Is there a better use for this bandwidth, and if so, what is it?

Input, anyone? What would you prefer to read in this space?

Quote of the Day: Life is like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you represents determinism; the way you play it is free will. –Jawaharlal Nehru

Metaphors For Life’s website