Life, 20 ounces at a time
One recent morning I asked my husband what size coffee he wanted with his cafeteria breakfast.
Foolish question. We had been sleeping in our daughter’s hospital room. In that situation, coffee only comes in one size: extra large.
Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh is set up for parents to stay with their children, even if, as in our case, the child is an adult. The couch turns into a single bed, with an additional single trundle bed that slides out. All in all, the beds are not uncomfortable, but it is a hospital, so we knew not to expect uninterrupted sleep.
We tried going to bed early each night to make up for the multiple nightly events: 10 p.m. medications, midnight vitals, 4:30 a.m. blood tests, and countless monitor activations in between. We were lucky to get 2 and a half consecutive hours of sleep and a total of six hours of rest each night. While shift change woke us, an extra large coffee brought us to awareness. By the third day, I managed not to spill it before getting out of the cafeteria.
The halls at Children’s are full of the walking wounded — not the young patients, but their parents and grandparents, all living 20 ounces of coffee at a time. We moved automatically from hospital rooms to the cafeteria. Two of us got on the elevator and pressed floors three and one. The doors closed, we went down, the doors opened. I got off. Not three. I got back on the next elevator down, the doors open and the parent heading to one is standing there on three, like me, simply responding to an opening door. Thought processes are reserved for medical decisions. Living is done by rote.
Siri became my best friend as I drove to and from the city, calling out turns I usually make on autopilot, but could miss in a heartbeat, or the nodding-off blink of an eye.
Children’s isn’t like an adult hospital. Early Sunday mornings the lobby looks like an airport waiting area, with families milling about with wheeled suitcases and children clutching favorite stuffed animals. It’s check-in time for patients undergoing elective procedures or on-going treatments, or just switching out this week’s clean clothes with last week’s laundry for those staying long-term. Entire families are present. Healthy children play with siblings sporting bandages, casts and IV poles. It becomes the new normal.
Facebook becomes the connection to the outside world. Spare rooms are offered to shorten the drive when we choose not to sleep at the hospital. One friend is familiar with the surgeon — he’s a good guy, tops in the field; another reminds us July is the start for new students at teaching hospitals, so they are brand new to the floor, just like us.
No one in the halls asks why your child is in the hospital. Everyone assumes it is something far worse than their own child’s ailment, and it usually is. Somewhere in those halls is the parent with the sickest child. No one wants to touch that raw pain, so we talk about our own affliction: the cognitive losses that come with sleep deprivation and stress, juggling hospital life with home life and jobs.
We laugh about barely knowing our own names, let alone the names of the countless doctors, nurses, technicians and social workers that come in and out of the hospital rooms, the amazing people who take care of the myriad of details we try to keep track of but don’t always remember. We learn the names of the people who go to bat for us — Lauren, the overnight nurse who made the executive decision to not have us transferred to a room on another floor at 1:30 in the morning; Brigid, who tracked down the name of our attending physician, and Keith in housekeeping services, who always had extra blankets, sheets and towels and a ready smile.
We are confident of the big things — the surgeon is skilled; the odds of survival probably better than the odds of getting home without being in a fender bender on the parkway. Beyond the surgeon, we have a God who is in control. And we remain grateful for the little things, including coffee that comes in extra large cups.