Hospitals Are Where the Home Is (And Why You Should Join Me, Not Pity Me)

I grew up in hospitals. My sharpest memories from my childhood are those blurred by anesthesia and Vicodin. I still recount stories to people of the best nurses, weirdest charitable visitors, and fluffiest therapy dogs.

I feel like modern media forms (i.e. literature, film, etc.) approach hospitals the wrong way. In fictional mediums, the creator chooses an extreme. The setting is either romanticized (The Fault in Our Stars) or nightmare-inducing (also The Fault in Our Stars). In reality, it just depends on who you ask. People who grew up as patients can have startlingly different experiences the same way as those who are parents/friends/lovers of patients.

And I know it often has to do with the reason you're there.

As weird as it sounds, I am fortunate enough to have a condition--a congenital birth defect called hydrocephalus--than a disease. It is ever-changing, but there are treatments. It is something that no longer has a life expectancy or an expiration date attached to it. This was a hard-to-learn realization that only happened after the death of a high school friend who was not as lucky.

Me? I'm glad that a majority of the time I was in the hospital, I was on an upwards trajectory.

I think for this to make sense, you might need a good explanation of what hydrocephalus actually is. I have spent a lot of time crafting my own, but I think you would benefit from the one that taught me everything I know:

"I was born with water on the brain.

"Okay, so that's not exactly true. I was actually born with too much cerebral spinal fluid inside my skull.  But cerebral spinal fluid is just the doctors' fancy way of saying brain grease. And brain grease works inside the lobes like car grease works inside an engine…But weirdo me, I was born with too much grease inside my skull, and it got all thick and muddy and disgusting, and it only mucked up the works. My thinking and breathing and living engine slowed down and flooded.

"My brain was drowning in grease."

                        --Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

If you haven't read this book, please do. Besides being a semi-autobiographical account of an extraordinary author, it has an entire passage on how books give you boners. And suddenly your questions about how this book could get banned are answered.

Now why I love hospitals?

1. Nurses are some the best people you will ever meet. 

Nurses do just about everything it is possible to do for you. As a kid, this means it feels like you are being waited on like a Disney princess with a shaved head. (They've now done all of the natural hair colors. That has to be next.)

Once when I was sixteen, two nursing students from the college I ended up attending spent three hours brushing out what was left of my waist-length hair after I told them my then-boyfriend was visiting. They spent half of their day at clinicals trying to make me look less like Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas, lamenting about how awful it was that a surgeon--whose main job is to have steady hands and be precise--could have shaved a head so haphazardly.

Another nurse routinely came into my room to help me with the Family Feud computer game I was playing, acting as family members two through five while my mom got to rest a little.

This isn't limited to pediatrics. I stayed in the grown-up hospital--I can't seem to call it anything else--last month for my latest round of surgeries, and had one guy on the night shift who talked to me about my favorite video games for half the night when I couldn't sleep. The next day, another nurse did everything she could to make me comfortable as I suffered complications; she even hugged my mom before going home. I don't think I have ever been so upset to miss my chance at a goodbye before.

2. It was the highlight of my social schedule.

I spent a lot of time out of school when I was a teenager, meaning I was constantly alone. I'm pretty sure this is when my habit of inner-monologuing started, if only because I had no one to talk to but myself most days.

In the hospital, there is always someone around to bother: doctors, med students, nurses, technicians, CNAs. And the best part? Part of their paycheck comes from their ability not to roll their eyes at the drug-induced babble of a teenage girl who was temporarily released from solitary confinement.

The weirdest part is I'm the most talkative while in the recovery room. Suddenly all I want to do is know the life story of everyone in the room. Even when I got my tonsils out last year, I wouldn't shut up. I just kept asking for more morphine so I could hear more about her kids.

3. DRUGS.

Seriously. Hospitals are like the State Farm of drugs. Nauseous? We've got you covered. Insomnia? We've got you covered. Ignorance? We…are going to have to get back to you on that.

But really. There is no better place to get sick because anything you would ever need is already there. One night I couldn't sleep from a steroid pack I was on to reduce swelling. I think they gave me three different types of medicine before I fell asleep, but they were determined to let me rest.

Another time I was in so much pain, the nurse managed to talk my anti-IV pain medication surgeon into letting me have a dose of morphine. If you have never felt the rush of going from decapitation-would-be-better-than-this pain to hallucinating the entire Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh theme song, I would, well, say don't try it. People who break their own legs for intravenous drugs are called addicts.

4. The swag bags.

This one probably applies more to my time in children's hospitals, but people love to give shit to sick kids. In a single hospital stay in July, I had a mascot whose tail kept hitting the medical equipment, two dogs, a high school basketball team, and Santa--yes, Santa--all visit. I was only there three days.

It's even better if you stay around the holidays. After a surgery on Halloween, the nurses reverse trick-or-treated, bringing all of the kids candy. Anything food-related improves dramatically around Thanksgiving. And during Christmas, you have candy canes and cookies coming out of every orifice where you don't have stitches.

                                                            --

Hospitals can be terrifying, and, like I said before, that can often be from circumstance. But if you're lucky enough to be my kind of sick, these pros greatly outweigh the cons.

Like the truckloads of needles and foreign objects they try to jam into your body. Consensually, of course.

Except for that one tech who tried to distract me with a story about how her son was also afraid of getting blood drawn. I watched Harriet the Spy too many times to fall for that one.

Men-Hating Feminists and Other Oxymorons

Note #1: This is my first blog post after a long few weeks of medical complications, but I'm healed up and back to writing. I plan to write about it later, but right now, something else demanded my attention.

Note #2: I plan to keep the following post as little about politics as possible. While feminism is largely debated between all people of the political spectrum, I would like to keep this more about cultural issues than my own political agenda. I also know this in no way can cover the entire scope of the issue, but I wanted to clear up a few misconceptions.

Before I get started, let me give you a couple of definitions so we can be on the same page--and there is one less excuse for not following:

1. fem-i-nism. n. the belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities.

2. op-press. v. a) to crush or burden by abuse or authority. b) to burden spiritually or mentally; weigh heavily upon.

While fooling around on the Internet, something came to my attention. Women Against Feminism is a Tumblr completely dedicated to, as you would guess, women who do not believe in the feminist movement. Now everyone is entitled to their own opinions, and that is what makes this world exciting, but some of the arguments posted seemed to be the result of misinformation and logical fallacy. The two I'm addressing are, once again as you would guess, feminism itself and the concept of oppression.

Let's start with feminism. People have started to think that feminists believe that the only way to equality is to bring down men, but to me, that is counter-intuitive to the movement.

One, it would mean that women could only be equal to men if they just stop trying so hard and being so darn successful. This suggests that women are not equal in the first place, that men need to be handicapped for progress to be made. Any real feminist would want equality to be won on hard work alone, not by transferring the weight culture has put on women to men.

Two, feminism is meant to empower men too. With common sayings like, "Man up" and "Grow a pair" considered pep talks, and "You throw like a girl" and "Boys don't cry" considered an insult, this suggests a weakness not only in being female but in feminine characteristics. This means that any man that does not fall under his gender role is considered a lesser person for falling under her gender role.

But if that's the case, why do we not change the name of the movement? It obviously is meant to help both men and women.

That's not a good enough reason. Although in the end, feminism will help both sexes, it still needs to focus on bringing up women. We can only reach the desired equality by de-stigmatizing femininity. By doing so, expected masculinity in men will fall with nothing to compare it to, and a domino effect will occur.

Now that we have had a crash course on feminism, let's talk about oppression.

One of the biggest arguments I saw on this Tumblr was that women in the Western world are not oppressed when compared to other parts of the world. Here are a few examples that, without question, fall under that category.

• Indian women are still being forced to marry their rapists.
• Women in Yemen can't leave their own home without asking their husbands' permission.
• Saudi Arabian women are not allowed to drive, limiting their societal and literal mobility.

These all give you a gut reaction. "Oh yes, that is so obviously wrong. It deprives them of basic human rights." 

What it shouldn't do is lead you to believe that just because these things are not happening in the Western world does not mean that the oppression of women does not exist.

There is a logical fallacy called the fallacy of relative privation. This is when people make their argument by comparing extreme examples. One common use of this fallacy is when people chastise others for complaining about overcooked food when there are starving children in Africa. Just because that is true, it does not actually detract from the situation at hand. It does not, in fact, make the food in front of you any less burnt.

This means that because the cases of oppression in the Western world are not as extreme as the ones above, they in no way make the ones happening any more right. 

Here are a few contemporary examples of oppression in the U.S:

• One student's rapists were sentenced to expulsion upon graduation for assaulting her despite video evidence.
• Women are still paid 77 cents for every dollar men make in the same field. 
• The Supreme Court ruled that Hobby Lobby can choose not to cover four types of birth control based on religious belief despite research that shows they do not cause abortions. 

So just because you do not feel oppressed at the moment does not mean that you are in the free and clear. Every decision made like the ones above can potentially set a precedent that may come to affect you in the worst of ways. Universities may feel they are justified in their continued mishandling of sexual assault. Employers will continue to accept the gender wage gap. More corporations can start making the final call on your reproductive health.

As for me?

I need feminism because I can't agree with anything that takes choices about my health and well-being out of my hands.

I need feminism because my breasts are not the only things about me that make me beautiful.

I need feminism because I want feminine to stop having any kind of connotation and start being a neutral adjective.

I need feminism because my tendency for tears and love for children are not feminine qualities--they are human qualities.

I need feminism because there's no reason equality should still be a debate in the twenty-first century.

And I need it now.