Hospitals

I took my friend to the hospital today. He was getting surgery on his knee (it went well) so I offered to drive him to the Richmond Kaiser. I decided to just stay there and work for the day, so I wouldn’t have to drive back and forth to pick him up afterwards. Plus, I’ve had a lot of practice working in hospitals, and I’m very good at navigating Kaiser cafeterias, so it was supposed to be easy.

But at about 6pm, after being at the hospital for five and a half hours, I realized I was tense. Very tense. And exhausted. The kind of exhausted I get when I’m holding myself together by a thread. But I didn’t have time for a breakdown – the nurse was calling me to say my friend was out of recovery and ready for me to take him home.

So I white knuckled it on the drive home, and let the tenseness keep me alert. And then I made dinner, because I had pizza dough I had to use before it went bad. And then, when the pizza was in the oven, and I had set a timer, and I had run out of shoulds that I needed to take care of, I went into my room and cried.

I cried because it was the first time I had been in a hospital since my mom died. I cried because I know how to work well in hospitals, and I can compare quality of cafeterias at Kaisers all around Northern California, and those are stupid things to be good at. I cried because my knowledge of hospitals is what made me feel confident that I could work all day in one, and that same knowledge, or more specifically how I got that knowledge, was putting my body back in survival mode. I cried because of the anxiety that lived in me all day long, an anxiety not caused by rational thought but by some sort of triggered memory I can’t even pin down. I cried because that was the only thing that made sense, because I can’t really rationalize why I needed to cry.

And after that I called my dad. Because after unconscious and irrational anxiety caused by spending my day in a hospital I just needed to hear his voice. I needed to know that he was okay, and that I was going to be okay, and that everything was going to be okay.