A Hospital Visit

The hospital by our house is immense. I live in a fairly rural area, and the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center makes everything within 50 miles look like Legos. It's hidden by a small forest and so it looms and bends towards you when you finally break through to its network of parking lots. As daunting as it may seem to many, the medical center is very well respected in many fields, and most who go there feel lucky they did. For me, as my mom's condition seemed to get worse and worse - maybe it was better and better who can tell - I found its grandness comforting. When a facility is that big it stands to reason there's at least one person who knows what they're doing.

So as I entered on one particular day, the first real day where I had to visit because my mom couldn't do anything else with me, I felt confident. It was an easy confidence; it was the confidence found in splendor. By this time my mother knew what she was doing. This wasn't at the beginning, and my mom had her routine all worked out. Thinking back on it, I don't remember where we went or what we were doing specifically, I only remember the waiting room. In it sat a mass of families. Each seemingly pushing through just another day, and yet, the tension was ripe. It was like a bath tap where the water has stopped running, but there is that one drop that sits at the edge of the spigot. It could sit there forever but you know it won't. It's just waiting to fall. In this room the tension was as close to breaking everything apart as was possible, and yet, there sat everyone, kids playing on the mini play space, husbands reading, mothers pretending to read while they secretly checked their kids on the mini slide.

I found myself asking how things could go on normally when just behind everyone's eyes lay a monster. Not everyone in the waiting room was there for breast cancer. Men were clearly the sick ones as well. One elderly man had a catheter which he subconsciously adjusted as if he were fixing his reading glasses. It wasn't the diseases I could feel in the room. It was the fear. And then the paper-thin mask the people threw over that fear for the sake of everyone else. But finally when one woman glanced over a fitness periodical and caught my eye, the tension in my mind broke. Everyone screamed and ran about in my imagination and I felt scared they would envelope me. Blood rushed through my neck and my head began to feel heavy. I felt for my knees and couldn't find them. My mom was beside me across a small square coffee table. She seemed too far away, and the people were still mad in my mind. The old man with the catheter was taking deep breaths and I began to inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale.

"PJ Hamel?"
"Yep," my mom said with a forced cheer.
"We're ready for you just back here. Today's a quick one. Probably only ten minutes."
"Yeah, I figured. Just checking in on yesterday, I thought."
"Yeh, just back here to the right."

And the tension vaporized. It just disappeared back into the air. The old man was fine and the children were fine, and the moms were still checking their children, and the dad's were still reading. But somewhere that pure confidence in the system had disappeared with the tension. I no longer felt as though this place could just fix it all. I felt as though it was really up to my mom to fix herself. ‘Now, of course she'd done everything else in the past, but could she do this?' I certainly hoped so.