In a striking departure from convention, a local woman professes to dislike going to hospitals, whether for her own health or to visit an ailing friend. “Oh, I hate hospitals,” she confessed to a group of relatives planning to look in on a cousin recovering from surgery as if they were going recreationally and wanted to know if she thought it would be fun. “You might not have known this about me, but I really hate them.”
“There’s just something about them that creeps me out,” she added, as if the vast majority of humans who spend the majority of their daily lives denying the reality of sickness, pain and death did not harbor identical sentiments about facilities that by their very nature belied that common delusion, as if she were somehow alone in feeling this way, when in fact it is perhaps one of the commonest feelings shared by modern humans. “Something,” in this case, presumably referred to the presence of a great many frail and failing human bodies dying all together at once and yet simultaneously very alone; the horrible unpredictability of pain; the fallibility of the practice of medicine in general and of individual doctors in particular; the harsh institutionalized setting; the featureless food; the comfortless walls and accoutrements; the fear of being left ill and alone.
“You guys understand, right?” she asked, as if not enjoying hospitals was a legitimate reason for avoiding them, as if anyone who lives long enough does not have sufficient and specific reason to hate hospitals, having seen the face of someone they loved turn into the face of a dead person, which is to say the face of no one at all.
Tags: everyone hates hospitals, hospitals, oh no the human condition, opinions
I’m even worse than this because I’ve said “I hate funerals”.
*hangs head in shame*
I hate weddings! How does that rank?
But do you still go?
There was one I should have gone to and didn’t, to be there for someone else, when I was a lot younger than I am now. But I have and will to all the future ones, that’s not a mistake I’ll make twice.
You and me both. It’s a mistake you only make once.
It’s a hard thing to go to a hospital (or a sickroom, or a home where a family member is dying), yes. But almost all the time it’s so much better than living with the fact that you didn’t go.
(This is along similar lines to some of the best advice I’ve heard, which is “Always go to the funeral”.)
ETA: And I’ll say that I was in the hospital for an extended period more than fifteen years ago, and I still think very fondly of the folks who came by to say hello to me and my family, and who wrote cards, and baked casseroles, and did all those kind things. It’s never wasted.
ALWAYS go to the funeral. This is one of the greatest things my parents have instilled in me, people are always so grateful if you go to the funeral even when they probably wouldn’t have missed you if you didn’t go, and they remember it for years afterwards.
*lighter note* I quite like hospitals, my mom worked (and still works) in one, so I mostly just remember visiting her and getting to go to the gift shop after. SWEETIES
Yes! This article stuck with me. Fortunately I haven’t had too many funerals to go to, but I do try when necessary.
http://www.npr.org/2005/08/08/4785079/always-go-t…
Oh, that was a great article, thanks for sharing it. That’s a philosophy that I believe in and try to live by (but don’t always, unfortunately).
I actually have a lot of strong feelings about this. I think that funerals are really important, both for the family and as a sign of respect for the life of the deceased, and to our society as a whole. I think that it’s important for kids to go, as well.
I didn’t go to my grandma’s funeral about a year ago because when I went to get plane tickets, they cost $700 or $800. I told my step-mom and she said it would be crazy for me to go, plus I was traveling for work at the time and the logistics were tough. But I still feel guilty about it. I’m a shitty grandson.
Yeah, I mean, I talk a big game, but there are definite gray areas when there’s major time and travel and money involved. I think your grandma would have understood.
One of the great regrets of my life is not going to a funeral–it wasn’t someone I knew personally, but it would have been to support a friend. Logistically it wasn’t really doable, but I still hate that I didn’t make it happen.
I do believe in “Always go to the funeral,” but with a caveat for situations where you simply cannot afford to go. I would have given anything to be there when they buried both of the grandparents I have thus far lost, but unfortunately they’re buried in Finland, and I’m not financially able to make something as short-notice as a funeral (hell, I can’t even make a planned-ahead trip, honestly). My aunt was sweet enough to set up a little candle votive to represent me at my grandmother’s funeral since I wasn’t able to attend in person, and my mother went as a representative for our entire family when her father died. But had I been able to, I certainly would have been there.
I cannot be guilted into going to hospitals for anyone I’m not willing to die for. Same goes for car trips.
Congratulations?
sorry, you’re probably willing to die for a lot more people than I am, haha.
“I also think nursing homes are creepy. There’s just… I don’t know, I think I’m the only one who can smell it, but there’s a weird smell. Do you guys smell that? What is it?”
Urine.
Uggghhhh I hate this so much. My grandmother was in a nursing home got 15 years -15 YEARS!! – and my cousin never visited her because of the smell. Yeah, I’m sure she thought it smelled like roses in there for 15 years A-HOLE.
I had minor outpatient surgery a couple of weeks ago, and I actually quite enjoyed my hospital visit. It was exciting! The building was fancy and the staff were nice and reassuringly thorough during intake.They were even really nice when they discovered in the operating theater that I’d lied about taking off my underwear (I didn’t think they’d check).
Also, on my cab ride there, we passed Bellevue and they had a really pretty looking lobby decorated for Christmas. My first, sleep addled thought was somehow “Wow, I hope I get to go there one day!” I would like to redact that one.
Yeah, uh, I’m afraid the key word here was “outpatient.”
Yes. People who have different experiences in hospitals have different feelings about them.
I wasn’t trying to be a dick! Hospitals are exciting and competent for the first x number of hours you’re there, when x is a small and easily digestible amount. After that it wears off precipitously.
I guess I have resentful feels about hospitals.
That totally makes sense. I’m lucky enough to mostly have good or neutral associations (competent, uncomplicated medical care, waiting for my family members to get off work) that overweigh the bad experiences (visiting ill relatives). I know not everyone has that luxury. I hope that henceforth your hospital visits are limited to Bellevue’s lobby!
Haha, unlikely, but it’s a great sentiment and thank you for it! I read up on Bellevue on wikipedia and it looks like they’d have a lovely old lobby :3
I get (at least part of) what you’re saying, though. I remember my father, during a long, scary hospital stay that we all knew was going to end in his death, diverting himself with the fascinating technical abilities, the protocols for handling social and medical consequences we’d never considered until then, and the brisk competence of his medical caregivers.
(In a smaller way: I have terrible dental panic, the kind that used to require a Valium to get me through any dental work, and I would distract myself with intent observation of all the cool equipment.)
Yes. Yes they do.
Bellevue’s lobby is *gorgeous* this time of year. It’s worth stoping inside for a look.
I used to work there as a pediatrician, so I feel protective! It’s one of the top trauma centers in the city and has great subspecialists that it shares with NYU. Plus its mission — to treat all patients who walk through the door regardless of income or insurance status — is pretty amazing.
But! I also hope you never have to go there as a patient! Or any other hospital, for that matter!
mildly tangential and not remotely amusing: am I one of the few people who feels that our culture “hides” sick and dying people, and that it makes us more phobic of illness and death than we need to be?
I agree. Then again, I have a chronic condition and have had uncountable hospital/doctor/lab visits since age 13. I’ve had plenty of time to Get Over my basic anxieties on illness, hospitals, or the medical establishment. Which is not to say that I’m never scared, but I’m not blaming the hospital.
Probably doesn’t hurt that I work in the medical device industry, or…hey, what we have here may be a chicken and egg situation.
Funny, I have a chronic condition and have had many surgeries and uncountable hospital/doctor/lab visits as well. I don’t have “basic anxieties” about hospitals anymore – they’ve morphed into something much more in-depth and complicated over time.
Spending 5 days in a hospital last summer with my dad before he passed away really didn’t help with that, either.
It obviously depends a lot on the person/experience/situation! It may be just the way my odd mind works, but I realized early on that, for me, any part of the whole hellish experience that I could possibly give myself room to NOT worry about, would be a benefit.
I’m sorry about your dad.
There’s certainly something to be said for being able to say “hey, I have [condition/side effect of treatment/etc.] that makes it hard for me to [stay out late/sit still for a long time/etc.], do you mind if we [______] instead?” and not have everybody go all hushed and apologetic. Being able to talk matter-of-factly about illness (physical and mental) would help a lot of people, I think.
Comments must be broken; I can’t thumbs up this x1000. All high school kids should do hospital community service, then we’d stop hearing this nonsense of not liking hospitals. People are just avoiding places that make them uncomfortable.
My mother is a nurse — from L&D (where, she said, “95% of the time you’re with someone on one of the best days of their life, but that other 5% of the time you’re with them on the very worst”) to Critical Care to, now, Emergency Room — and was always very open and honest with us about death, emphasizing that it was something natural and normal and that, while of course it wasn’t something she wanted to happen soon for anyone in her family (or for anyone in general), it was something that was going to happen eventually, so we were really able to make peace with that. Combined with the many, many hours we spent in the hospital for my little brother’s hemophilia, I did find, growing up, that I seemed to have an easier time with illness and death and hospitals in general than a lot of my peers did. Of course, it can go the opposite direction, as well — a friend who had cancer as a child has a serious phobia of all things medical, which is also understandable — but in general, yeah, I think it might help with the extreme reactions to death and illness.
that’s really great, the way your mother approached it! I was made aware of this whole thing because I’m going through nursing school right now. It’s made me a lot more comfortable with people who are sick, disabled, or elderly, and I realized how sheltered I had been before.
Fucking right on.
I lost a beloved, way-too-young family member to cancer last year, and there was a lot of time in the hospital, and yes, it was so damn hard, but…now I wish I had been there even more.
True story: My mother moved to A Developing Country for a couple of years for work. She and one of the only other single women were placed in apartments in the same building. My mom was about 60 and the other woman was about 24, I think. Anyway one night the younger woman calls up to my mom in the middle of the night, extremely ill with food poisoning or some other ailment. She asked to borrow some cash to take a taxi to the hospital, since she didn’t have enough cash. My mother, being a human being, said “don’t be ridiculous, I’ll drive you there.” So she drove the woman to the hospital and back. Because when you’re two single women in a foreign country, you help each other out and stick together.
A short time later the younger woman says thank you to my mom, who responds with a version of the above, and that she hoped the favor would be returned if she ever needed it. To which the younger replied, in all seriousness and to my mom’s face, “Oh…..I don’t know if I could actually. I don’t like hospitals.”
UNACCEPTABLE
AaaaaHhhhHHH GAH!
I mean, in 10 years, that younger woman will likely look back and slap herself solid right upside the head, but GAH!
Lordy-loo, at the very least, you don’t say that to the person.
Oh my god, that last sentence hit me where I live.
Also – Mallory, is everything alright?
Golden! I write fiction.
Thank goodness. My heart was hurting for you girl!
I don’t find hospitals all that bad, but I’ve spent a lot of time in them as a patient and visitor, and now I’m a nursing student so I get to see it from the other end. I love it but I don’t know if I want to work in a hospital necessarily, and I have this crazy dream to work in a women’s health clinic. I have about a year and a half left before I see if that dream sticks.
I always tend to freak people out when tell them I love hospitals. Where else can you go that’s very clean, full of smart people, and where you’re bound to get some attention and the chance to watch TV for a little while… Of course, this opinion is the direct result of having been hospitalized during my early years a number of times for various injuries, none of which were that serious. I have no doubt that if something major happened to me or anyone else, I would quickly dread the hospital. But for now, I like thinking of them as welcoming care palaces.
I actually had a great experience late in my pregnancy when I got to stay in a hospital for three days, got to lie in bed and be brought food basically whenever and watch whatever TV I wanted and use my iPod with their free wifi, and no one trying to make me do the dishes or cook or anything else. Would have been great except for the near-constant pain I was in.
I feel like if I developed some sort of non-hospital Pregnancy Retreat, where heavily-pregnant women can go to escape from responsibility and other humans and get massages and have other people bring them food, I could make some people very happy.
Like medieval confinement, except assumedly with less people and occasionally letting air in?
Please make this happen in the next two months exactly.
OMG, I am 36 weeks pregnant right now and I want this SO MUCH
I feel the same way (I like your term “welcoming care palaces”). And I’ve spent plenty of time at plenty of different hospitals for both chronic and acute (sometimes life-threatening) situations (see my comment above). I mean, obviously given the choice I’d prefer not to, but very rarely are you actually given the choice.
That’s how I feel, too. I’m sure it’s because there isn’t anyone I’ve lost too young when I was old enough to remember, but I’m impressed with their cleanliness and their interesting technology, and I associate them with receiving care from strangers or spending time with family.
Uh, sorry to disillusion you, but hospitals are some of the most unhealthy places you can be — for all kinds of necessary and inevitable reasons, as doctors and nurses know. They have high rates of special mutant infections that don’t respond to antibiotics, which is one of the reasons that so many people get dangerous secondary infections *while* in hospital. Go ahead and think of them as “welcoming care places,” that’s a lovely image, but don’t forget to wash your hands.
(You might also want to stop saying things like that to those of us who have spent months visiting a dying person in the hospital — it really is a little upsetting to hear something this out of touch and, I’m sorry, stupid. Or at least say “I’ve loved my *experiences* of hospitals up until now).
“Of course, this opinion is the direct result of having been hospitalized during my early years a number of times for various injuries, none of which were that serious. I have no doubt that if something major happened to me or anyone else, I would quickly dread the hospital.”
“I always tend to freak people out when tell them I love hospitals.”
The point wasn’t how you feel about hospitals – you’ve definitely got every reason to feel however you feel. It was about being a reasonable mensch when talking to other people.
Well, that and “Where else can you go that’s very clean,” “where you’re bound to get some attention and the chance to watch TV for a little while.” (!)
These kinds of blanket statements about hospitals are not a great idea, unless you want to give a certain picture of yourself to other people.
Man, The Toast is out to get me this afternoon. First the post on military families (which I am now in, thanks for joining up, bro) and now hospitals (which my grandfather is now in, again, and probably for the last time, we don’t know yet).
What bums me out is nobody wants to die in a hospital but about a third of us do. (And 21 percent die in nursing homes, which is probably worse.)
During two brutal years of my 20s, I spent most of my free time sitting with one beloved or another in some area hospital – people for whom those years were, of course, exponentially more brutal. During that time, I lost not only the loved one who ultimately died from his illness, but also a whole host of friends I dropped after they looked me in my blank, drawn, exhausted face and blithely announced “Oh, I hate hospitals!” as an excuse for never visiting. Goodbye, you heartless fuckers. I have no room in my life for you.
… except for one of them. A friend’s friend who, I realized later, had a literal phobia about hospitals, came every day to my loved one’s family, always bringing a covered dish or a coffee cake or a vase of flowers or a stack of magazines, sometimes staying to do dishes or fold laundry. She couldn’t bring herself to set foot in the hospital, so instead she came to their home and helped as much as she could.
That made a certain sense to me: if you can’t – really can’t – do the thing you know is right, you do the next best thing.
Me, to my doctor (regarding a Lyme disease scare): “I’m just really freaked out by the idea of having a tick on me. Uh, as opposed to everyone else on earth, I guess.”
I did enough paid medical studies in my youth that I don’t hate hospitals, and kind of like them.
My first hospital memories were actually super positive, since I went to day care at the hospital where my mom worked. (They had some kind of program set up for working parents.) I just remember being so impressed with how giant and clean it was and how many different things were all going on there at once.
True story: My mother LOVES hospitals! But she’s mentally ill – some terrifying combination of Munchausen Syndrome(NOT by proxy, thank the stars) and hypochondria. I can always tell when she calls me to tell me she’s in the hospital, because she sounds utterly happy and serene (not her normal state whatsoever).
True story: My mother LOVES hospitals! But she's mentally ill – some terrifying combination of Munchausen Syndrome(NOT by proxy, thank the stars) and hypochondria. I can always tell when she calls me to tell me she's in the hospital, because she sounds utterly happy and serene (not her normal state whatsoever).
I do believe in "Always go to the funeral," but with a caveat for situations where you simply cannot afford to go. I would have given anything to be there when they buried both of the grandparents I have thus far lost, but unfortunately they're buried in Finland, and I'm not financially able to make something as short-notice as a funeral (hell, I can't even make a planned-ahead trip, honestly). My aunt was sweet enough to set up a little candle votive to represent me at my grandmother's funeral since I wasn't able to attend in person, and my mother went as a representative for our entire family when her father died. But had I been able to, I certainly would have been there.
Goodness. I don’t like hospitals even a little bit, but when someone I know is in one, I suck it up. My personal hangups are no reason to neglect someone in a time when they need support! I feel like most people that use this as an excuse to just not even visit are really just saying, “I don’t value you as much as you think I do.”
Goodness. I don't like hospitals even a little bit, but when someone I know is in one, I suck it up. My personal hangups are no reason to neglect someone in a time when they need support! I feel like most people that use this as an excuse to just not even visit are really just saying, "I don't value you as much as you think I do."
Uh, sorry to disillusion you, but hospitals are some of the most unhealthy places you can be — for all kinds of necessary and inevitable reasons, as doctors and nurses know. They have high rates of special mutant infections that don't respond to antibiotics, which is one of the reasons that so many people get dangerous secondary infections *while* in hospital. Go ahead and think of them as "welcoming care places," that's a lovely image, but don't forget to wash your hands.
(You might also want to stop saying things like that to those of us who have spent months visiting a dying person in the hospital — it really is a little upsetting to hear something this out of touch and, I'm sorry, stupid. Or at least say "I've loved my *experiences* of hospitals up until now).
"I always tend to freak people out when tell them I love hospitals."
The point wasn't how you feel about hospitals – you've definitely got every reason to feel however you feel. It was about being a reasonable mensch when talking to other people.
Well, that and "Where else can you go that's very clean," "where you're bound to get some attention and the chance to watch TV for a little while." (!)
These kinds of blanket statements about hospitals are not a great idea, unless you want to give a certain picture of yourself to other people.