December 1, 2011
The city streets are very deserted at 3:00 AM. You can go from point A to point B with few obstacles. It’s quite peaceful, really. There’s a certain amount of serenity in the darkness, the quiet and the lack of traffic. One has a moment or two to reflect on life’s strange quirks.
Life has many quirks. Some are funny. Some are not. When one gets a call before 3:00 AM, it’s never good and it’s seldom funny. My first thought was, I hope that’s my husband’s buddy drunk-dialing again. It wasn’t.
So I found myself on the deserted city streets, viewing the seeming serenity of the quiet darkness, contemplating this sudden turn, hoping the quirk turned out to be funny. It didn’t.
Buzzers tell stories, as do bleeps and blips. Hospitals are full of these sounds. Each turn in the long corridors offers new levels of sound, new reminders of the frailty of life—and life is very frail. As I passed every door along the way, I viewed quiet, dark rooms with traumatized bodies, staff who worked to make them healthy and machines with monitors and mysterious buzzers, bleeps and blips.
Those in the know, those tireless members of the medical community, possess the knowledge of what each sound means. They view the monitors with careful consideration, jump to attention with every minuscule change, take action when needed, or simply offer words of encouragement to scared, broken humans.
Even the waiting room has these sounds. Coffee machines bleep and blip. Intercoms buzz. At this time of day, though, there’s no one else around to hear it. There is nothing but the waiting, the quiet contemplation and the sad knowledge of why one is there.
Whole lifetimes can be spent in a single hour of waiting. The hospital chaplain will stand in quiet support, family members arrive with looks of horror on their faces. Life is frail.
The halls of the hospital are long, dark and quiet. Moving through them is akin to being a mouse trapped in a maze. Each footfall is a reminder of the waiting. Pacing through the corridors is hard on the feet, but occupies the mind, keeping it distracted from the sounds in the rooms.
Doctors in white coats confer with families and loved ones, nurses and orderlies rush about as they tend to their charges, housekeeping staff bring linens and sweep floors. Worried faces of mothers, lovers, fathers, siblings, husbands, wives, children—all listening to the bleeps and blips and buzzes—all of them hope for a miracle and some get it.
The interminable hallways beckon as we move from one waiting room to another on the other side of the facility. The air ambulance has landed, the procedure performed and the patient moved to recovery. The frailty of life does battle with the indomitable human spirit and loses. The day is won, but the waiting continues. A smile, a confused look, a frown that asks what happened and all are relieved to see the will to live, to return to things left undone and the anger of being disrupted. There are strong indicators in the buzzing, the bleeping and the blips. It’s a steady rhythm, a chorus of powerful music, singing of life restored. Rock on.
