waiting...

My father is at the hospital right now. While everyone else was taking a moment of silence for Remembrance Day...I was driving my dad to Montfort hospital to sign him in for his surgery. I knew the moment that I saw him that he was nervous; He was pale and quiet...just what I would expect. I would likely be the same way.

Hospitals leave much to be desired. This one in particular though is even less appealing because it's currently undergoing renovations. We walked in through the main lobby and felt like we had just entered a dungeon. Construction workers everywhere, dark and dinging lighting, improvised admission areas to accommodate the otherwise congested wings of the hospital…it makes the experience of waiting for surgery even more anxious.

I don’t know how people do it…the people that have to spend countless days, weeks, months or even years going in and out of hospitals. How do they cope with the endless despair of being in these places? The bare walls, the medicinal smell, the token coffee and gift shop down in the lobby. It seems to me that if anywhere should be wrought with design consideration, it should be hospitals. There has got to be a more hopeful way of plastering the walls than this.

When we arrive at my father’s surgical wing, they ask us to wait in the hall. A “waiting room” has been created in the elevator lobby for all of us. I’m sitting on a plastic chair next to a vending machine while my father paces up and down the hallway. Finally, the nurse comes and tells us that visitors are no longer permitted from this point on and that it would be in everyone’s best interest for me to go home and wait there. “We’ll call in fiver or six hours,” she tells me. Dad and I look at each other and I give him a hug. He goes in to experience an endless array of medical jargon from anesthesiologists and surgeons, and I go home…to wait.

I feel like we’ve been waiting a lot lately...