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.
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