A Rough First Night

Melissa reported that last night was very difficult. Much of this is due to the lack of sleep and the other child patient in the room who cried throughout most of the night.

To get Raul Matthew a break from the hospital environment, we headed to the nearby Indianapolis Childrens Museum where Raul Matthew played with robots, in the water, and in the sand. We also saw a T-Rex and a SuperCroc replica in the dinosaur display. I found the 4-story tall "Fireworks of Glass" chandelier created by Dale Chihuly to be especially interesting. The experience of having a heavy heart in a light-hearted place, however, reminded me of Rousseau's opening line in the Social Contract: "Man is free, but is everywhere in chains."

Raul Matthew and I made the mistake of driving back to Kokomo during rush hour to check on the cats and pick up a few badly needed items. Once at home, I loaded the back of Ground Force One with several plastic bins and a hand truck for hauling the bins into the Ronald McDonald House. We had a bin for toys, a bin for clothes, a bin for electronic equipment, and most importantly, a bin for cooking equipment such as my Lodge cast iron skillet. We stopped by my office before heading home to pick up a TV, DVD player, and VCR player which I never used at work, and then stopped by Starbucks where I introduced Raul Matthew to the joys of caramel apple cider. We headed back to Indy around 9:00 PM. The return trip included a stop to the grocery store to pick up garlic, chives, chicken, and some other things.

Great news--before we got back to Indy, Myla had been moved to a private room--a development that played Ja'net Du Bois's Movin' On Up in my mental jukebox. Unlike the Jeffersons, we didn't move either "on up" or "to the east side," but it sure beats the cave we shared with another family. Personally, I found that my spirits were down yesterday due in large part to the relatively poor room situation.

I couldn't help but think of how quickly the "prisoners" in the infamous Stanford Prison Study broke down after only a few days of controlled confinement. In many ways, I'm guessing that some of the feelings I'm experiencing are also felt by the newly convicted during the first days of confinement. I'm sure those who have actually served hard time would scoff at this comparison while the health community would be offended, but I still think there are some valid points of comparison.

For starters, the institution takes over writing the script of your life story. Sometimes this control is explicit--the when and where of your life is controlled by others. At other points, the control is less direct, but present nonetheless. I've been struck, for example, by the hundreds of instructional signs posted not only at the hospital, but also at the Ronald McDonald House. I plan to reflect on these signs in more detail in some later post, but take for example this sign against smoking in the bathrooms at Riley. There are tons of these signs everywhere, and they often appear in clusters. I think these signs are necessary, but they are also a constant psychological reminder that I am no longer in control of even the small things in life. I must wash my hands. I must make sure Raul Matthew is wearing an apple sticker when playing in the playroom. I must make sure the toys he plays with are placed in the "dirty" bin. And so it goes on and on in a process of incrementally eroding my sense of control.

I've also been reflecting on how even the hospital equipment sends a message. Take the hyper-crib-thingy in Myla's room. In addition to looking like a Frankensteinian contraption, even its name is harsh. As the label states, this "electric hospital crib" was made by Hard Manufacturing located on Grider Street in Buffalo, New York. How soft and cuddly is that?

Myla no longer smells like a Johnson & Johnson baby. She smells like hospital.