Hwk 27

Louis lies there helplessly, with an IV drip that connects to a vein in his right hand. Besides him sits his son; he looks pale, tired and stressed. I can tell he hasn’t been caring much about himself. Louis is facing upwards, towards the ceiling; his eyes are shut and his mouth shows a small gap where he is breathing from. I watch as his chest repeats a countless cycle of slowly rising and falling. I keep hearing the soft beep of the heart beat monitor. Most of the area surrounding us is white or blue, cold to the touch. Doctors and nurses walk around from one patient to another. Some are attending phones while some are talking with coworkers or the care takers of patients. The nurses wear blue scrubs, while doctors roam around in their white coats; sanitizing their hands every so often. I hear an announcement about the visiting hours for patients. Unfortunately Louis doesn’t have much to say in the condition he is in. He is unconscious, barley breathing; yet still alive by looking at his heart beat monitor. I think to myself, does he really want to stay alive in this condition? Is he willing to go through all this pain and suffering just to see another day in this world?

Atop the table besides him sits a bouquet of flowers. How will this contribute in making him feel better? Did placing these flowers here guarantee that he will be living another day? Why waste all this money to show pity? This is what society teaches us to do, to make a “nice” gesture so we can be seen as doing something really caring. But why do we care so much about attempting to show this “nice” gesture by buying these items which are completely useless to the ill? Here is a guy who is unconscious, he lies on a hospital bed with no idea what surrounds him. What purpose do the flowers serve in this situation? Our culture makes it seem as if we are expected to purchase unnecessary objects to show that we dearly “care” our loved one(s).

When we are close to the individual that is sick and dying, we tend to lose interest in our own life. The son of this elderly man is very worried, as if it is his life which is being questioned at the moment. There is nothing he can do in this situation to help his father out; this is one thing which is completely out of his hands. When sickness or death arrives upon one, there is not much we can do but hope; as humans we over use this idea of hope. When we see that things don’t look so great for the future, we force out these negative thoughts from our minds. We make believe that everything will be okay; when in reality it never will be okay. In our culture we have always been taught to have a positive approach to illness and death, which makes us weak when we try to digest the bitter fact of death. We will hope for the best and pray that all will be well towards the end, but isn’t it the end that we are afraid of?

The hospital scene was much like what I saw in Near Death. One specific part from this documentary kept coming up in my mind while I was visiting Louis. It was when the guy was answering a phone call received from a ill patient’s family. The family of the ill individual was calling to figure out the condition of their loved one. In his reply the man who received the call said “It’s in God’s hands”. This idea of everything being left out to the open was shown a lot throughout my hospital visit. Nobody looked as if they were willing to discuss illness or death in such an open manner. They always tried to make the situation seem better through the use of positive words. I also kept recalling when Beth stated that “there comes a time where one has to let go”. At the same time I thought to myself: what is the use of a hospital if at the end we are all expected to let go. Reading Mountains Beyond Mountains also helped me get a better view of doctors attending all these ill patients. After reading about Farmer, I was able to apply his thoughts to the doctors I saw in the hospital I visited. Watching them scurry around attending one patient, then serving the next; I was easily able to tell that like any other job their job is not easy at all. Atop of that, they have a heavy load on their shoulders since they will be the one to blame if something were to go wrong with a patient. Which makes me think, why do we risk the life of our loved ones in the hands of a stranger who claims to have a medical degree?