Well, as Week Six at Seattle Children’s Hospital draws to a close, I thought I should take a moment to extole my hospital knowledge upon my willing readers.
How to Survive Living in a Hospital Version1.0
1 Make friends with the Nurses. You will see them more than anyone else, they have normal lives they will tell you about, and they are in more direct charge of you or your child’s care than anyone else, including the doctors.
2. Start thinking in hospital time: Days blur together, the night routine is identical to the day routine, and if you try to keep track of real world time, you quickly begin to feel as if you live in an alternate reality. Better to just adapt as quicklly as possible to the flow of the mini-world that a hospital in. And if you tend to think its Wednesday when it is really Sunday? And you don’t know where the last four days went? Chalk it up to cosmic variance between the real world and your world, and move quietly throughout your day. Or is it night?
3. Move In. Bring on the Baby Clothes! Bouncy chair? Step on down! Sling? Will be your best friend, it should be the first thing you bring down. When you try and pretend to have a little bit of normalcy, it makes the tubes, wires, and fact that you are, in fact, living in a hospital, seem normal as well.
4. Plan on Never Leaving. This way,you don’t get disappointed if dates get changed, and it is a surprise the day you walk out the door. Much mental anguish can be spared this way.
This experience has certainly been an excercise in patience for me. As the days and weeks pass, I find myself ebbing and flowing on the tides of impatience. Some times I just can’t wrap my mind around how, for a baby who is drastically healthier than the majority of the patients here, we have been here longer than nearly all of them. And then I remember that you can’t force healing. It must come at the pace of the tissue affected. Furthermore, if you do try to force healing more quickly than said tissue is ready for, invaribly you will backslide, and end up with a longer recovery than you originally anticipated.
Ramsey is the light in my world, inspite of where we are gettting to know each other. He is more alert every day, and has started smiling and grinning, which is, hands down, the best thing to wake up to in the entire world.
As he lies in my arms sleeping while I write this, I am reminded of two things: 1. No matter where life begins, and where it takes you, if you look hard enough you will find that you are usually right where you need to be to handle your lfe.
and
2. Even when living in a hospital, babies need baths.
