Prompt #

Hospitals are strange places. I'm remembering times when my children were hospitalized for serious illnesses. My son was at the hospital a lot and I got very good at negotiating the hospital world, learning the best way to deal with nurses and doctors, learning the schedule, the culture and the way things were done. Time moves differently when you are in the hospital. The outside world fades away. It's all the sound of nurse's thick soled shoes on the tile floors, the beeping of machines and the rattle of carts on wheels and the quiet sound of people in library or church. When N was little and had a bout with pneumonia he had a bed in the pediatric oncology ward at Children's Hospital. I learned a lot about brave there. 

My first job at 17, when I was working every chance I could to get enough money saved to get out the minute I turned 18, was at a Convalescent Hospital. It was such a terrible place. Poorly run, with inadequate staff and not enough supplies. There was a constant demand for simple things like clean dry sheets. We were lucky if there were two of us on a shift. We'd been given almost no training and were caring for people who were very old and sick and sometimes dying. My first day there I was given a dying man. I remember how he breathed. The sound was distinctive. Death rattle is not poetic license. I remember not understanding how to read the old fashioned thermometer or how to use the blood pressure cuff. No-one showed me. I remember how inadequate I felt and how dumb. He wasn't conscious, the tiny gray faced man. I apologized for not knowing how to take care of him. I apologized for his dying. I did the best I could, which wasn't good enough. 

I lost a lot of weight at that job. I had no appetite and could never get the smell of death and shit out of my uniforms or off my skin. We all drank Tab and smoked Virginia slims for dinner. We were always tired. We were all desperate for jobs or we'd have left. I hated getting attached to the patients and having them die. 

I especially liked the patients living in other times. I remember arguing with everyone who called them crazy. I was certain that there was no way to know who was crazy- us or them. We were convinced of our reality, and these patients were in another one. I thought they were lucky. The reality I could see around them was grim and lonely and full of pain, indignity and bad smells. The past was full of hot tea in china cups and lovers and children playing in apple trees and fresh mint floating in ice water. I was introduced to many husbands and wives I couldn't see. I was always polite. 

Have you ever been lost in another time and place? A time when you weren't lucid? Was it a fever or too many shots? Dissociating or hallucinogens? Or were you just writing? 

When the writing gets hot and things are moving fast between my head and the page, I can get lost in the world I am writing in. I love when that happens. 

Can you imagine a character whose present vanishes? Where do they go? What do they see? 

Time traveling, dementia or acid... it doesn't matter. You can play with time and space however you want when it's your pen. You make the world on page. 

or 

She kept losing her shoes....

***

He didn't want to tell her...

***

Tell me one secret...or...I will tell you one secret 

***

The trick is to...

****

Write for awhile today if you can. Five minutes or fifteen. Or draw instead. 

I hope this day is good to you and your creative. 

Last, today, is the hospital poem I found- 

The Hospital Window

BY JAMES L. DICKEY

I have just come down from my father.

Higher and higher he lies

Above me in a blue light

Shed by a tinted window.

I drop through six white floors

And then step out onto pavement.

Still feeling my father ascend,

I start to cross the firm street,

My shoulder blades shining with all

The glass the huge building can raise.

Now I must turn round and face it,

And know his one pane from the others.

Each window possesses the sun

As though it burned there on a wick.

I wave, like a man catching fire.

All the deep-dyed windowpanes flash,

And, behind them, all the white rooms

They turn to the color of Heaven.

Ceremoniously, gravely, and weakly,

Dozens of pale hands are waving

Back, from inside their flames.

Yet one pure pane among these

Is the bright, erased blankness of nothing.

I know that my father is there,

In the shape of his death still living.

The traffic increases around me

Like a madness called down on my head.

The horns blast at me like shotguns,

And drivers lean out, driven crazy—

But now my propped-up father

Lifts his arm out of stillness at last.

The light from the window strikes me

And I turn as blue as a soul,

As the moment when I was born.

I am not afraid for my father—

Look! He is grinning; he is not

Afraid for my life, either,

As the wild engines stand at my knees

Shredding their gears and roaring,

And I hold each car in its place

For miles, inciting its horn

To blow down the walls of the world

That the dying may float without fear

In the bold blue gaze of my father.

Slowly I move to the sidewalk

With my pin-tingling hand half dead

At the end of my bloodless arm.

I carry it off in amazement,

High, still higher, still waving,

My recognized face fully mortal,

Yet not; not at all, in the pale,

Drained, otherworldly, stricken,

Created hue of stained glass.

I have just come down from my father.