Living on Hospital Time

Time crawls along slowly in a hospital. The hands of the big clock on the wall seem to reluctantly click from one number to the next.

Here, time is measured, not in minutes, but from when the nurse comes into the room and when she’ll return, when the doctor is scheduled to come in and when lunch will arrive.

            And in between those events is an almost unbearable period of waiting.

            I’m with my mom following her left knee replacement surgery, and she came through the procedure with flying colors. She’s spending the next week or so in in a rehabilitation center, and life here is different from life in the outside world.

Before 7 a.m., Mom’s in the gym where physical therapists guide patients through leg lifts and arm stretches. A stopwatch sits next to Mom and she has to lift her leg as many times as she can until the buzzer goes off.

Next to her, an elderly lady – her hair Lady Clairol Jet Black, her thin arms a difficult road map of purple skin and raised veins – sits erectly in a wheelchair and stares into space. 

            “It’s time for me to go back to my room,” she announces to no one in particular.

            A young therapist, her pony tail bouncing, tries to convince this woman the exercises are for her own good, but she shifts in her wheelchair and her mouth tightens.  

            “I’m not doing anything except going home,” the woman says and everyone in the room looks away, concentrating on their own exercises.

They know if they allow their minds to drift away, they might never come back. They know without the exercises, their bodies will go back to the state they were in before they came in for surgery, and they don’t want that, most of all my mom.

            At 81, she’s setting the bar high. She completes all her exercises and follows all the rules. She doesn’t complain, even when the physical therapy is tough for her. But for a woman used to living on her own, living on someone else’s time schedule has been difficult.

            Like many seniors, she’s developed her own routine. Dinner’s about 6 p.m. followed by whatever’s on TV or a community meeting. She goes to bed when she’s ready and gets up when her body tells her.

But not in the hospital. She’s on someone else’s schedule where the base structure is marking time and waiting.

In the evenings, we wait for the nurse to come and dispense night-time medication. We can hear the heavy cart beeping as it rolls down the hall and the creak of one of the heavy doors as the nurse enters a patient’s room.

            We know the nurse will be in that room for at least 20 minutes, so we chit chat until Mom dozes off or talk about the mindless shows on television that, because there’s no other game in town, hypnotize us.

            When the cart stops outside our door, we wait for the nurse to pull up the right chart and come in with the meds, to readjust the dressing on Mom’s knee and perform all the routine blood pressure and temperature checks.

            The nurse leaves and Mom is instantly asleep as she’s waited as long as she could wait for the nurse to come and, now that she’s finished, she can finally go to sleep.

            Mom will sleep until the next time the nurse comes in to check her vital signs. And then wait for the routine to begin again.

            And we’ll wait until it’s time for Mom to go home and she can go back to living on her own time.

 This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald