Goodbye to the hospital

We're home. We both smell a bit rank, but that can be fixed. It's good to see the sky again.

What you get when you grab a book in a big hurry to take to the hospital:

"I had always been fascinated by these cactus plants, with their burden of thick red dust, because for me they were the truest product of the Mexican soil. Unforgiving, bitter and reluctant, they etched themselves against the dark blue sky and stood like gaunt cathedrals. ... I studied the cactus for some time and wished that I had absorbed a little more of its unyielding vigor..."

Sigh.

I kept trying to hoard plastic spoons, because when they bring Zed pudding they don't bring a spoon. Spoons are kept behind a password-locked door. Various people kept discovering my cache and sweeping the spoons away when I wasn't looking. "You cannot use a spoon twice. You must discard it after one use," I was told.

What you get more of than anything else in the hospital: ice which gets poured in a pitcher and melts immediately since it is only at 32 degrees when they bring it to you.

Many people come in, in all the different hospital garbs. I know the clothes are hierarchically graded, as with the old-fashioned sumptuary laws, but I never learned the code... Many of these people ask: "How are you?" but when Zed starts to answer, they inform him they are only interested in how he reacted to the anesthetic, or whether we need more half-melted ice, and any other answer must be referred to some absent individual (probably in different garb).

On the TV there are several channels featuring people having medical procedures, or who are visiting their doctor's office. Who is lying in a hospital bed wanting to watch somebody else lying on a hospital bed on TV?

I don't have a lot of complaints about this hospital, other than the clumsy way they treated Zed's pain - give him nothing for a while, then when he starts to pass out give him every narcotic in the place so he sleeps all day long, then say "no more narcotics." The best thing about this hospital: free parking.

It's good to be home.