Hospital As Stark Scary Death Box? Hardly

Well kids I spent the whole day today in the hospital waiting for my mother to get out of her triple bypass surgery. She is doing just fine now. But as I was sitting there in the waiting room, I had time to think - especially when the battery wend down on my laptop.

First thing I noticed is that the waiting room was nothing and I mean NOTHING like it is on TV and in the movies (goddamnit, duped again). There were two couches squeezed into a corner of a long hallway, edged out of the way of the passing meds, patients and lumbering hospital beds whizzing by. There was no actual room, there were no tissue boxes on nice end tables, hell we didn't even have a fucking water cooler. Nothing. It was pretty disappointing that the waiting room is not even really a room.

Also, the peple in the hospital looked really SICK. I mean, I know nobody wears makeup and has great hair in the hospital, but some of the patients I saw were really messed up. Hair all every which way, live spots, wrinkles, sallow faces, tubes all over the place, blinking and beeping, asleep, eating slowly, staring into space, watching TV... Duped again!! I had never seen such a sorry bunch of people in my whole life.

I won't even get into what the food looked like that they were feeding these sick people.

But with all this around me, I did realise again that the hospital was different than portrayed in Hollywood. It wasn't scary. There were warm toned tiles on the floor, the couches were warm toned too. Plants were everywhere you looked in the halls and lounge. There was no weird smell that I had always heard people speak of. I didn't feel like death was looming around every corner. It didn't seem over sanitized. I was taken aback by that. And the staff was very nice and informative, not cold and trying to run somewhere else rather than talk to you.

Granted I don't watch any of the popular hospital shows - god, the first and last one I watched was St. Elsewhere. Remember that? The only Hollywood hospitals I ever got was in movies - and in the movies it's a lot more graphic and scary. I guess that was my only frame of reference before sitting in the hospital today. And I have to say that I can't really bitch about the hospital like I do everything else I do here.

Besides. I don't have the energy to do so anyway - sitting in the hospital "waiting room" all day can wear you out!!