A Dreadful Hospital Visit
Many people have events in their lives that can take a toll on them, where they do not know what to do or they are simply at a loss. Mine was when my best friend Emily was sent to the hospital for emergency surgery and had to stay overnight for two nights.
The day started out normal; I went to class like I do every day.
But after class, Emily said, “Will you go to the doctor’s office with me?” She had been in a great deal of pain and could not figure out why.
Emily has Crohn’s disease, but she was not sure what this pain was because she had never felt it before. She described it to me as “feeling like someone was holding a hot plate in one spot that was burning her skin.”
The doctor’s office was quiet and chilly, and the white walls made the lights as bright as the sun.
When the doctor came out, she said, “Emily Morgan… I am ready to see you now.”
The doctor was dressed in a long white jacket, and she had a stethoscope around her neck with her long brown hair covering most of it. Her fingernails were painted red and they were wrapped around a clipboard as she called Emily’s name to come back to the examination room.
After a half-hour (which felt like forever), Emily finally returned and said, “I need to go to the emergency room, will you please take me?”
When we got there, the emergency room was not very busy, but as we waited for her parents to arrive, it felt as though we had been sitting there for hours. She finally got called to the examination area and was taken back shortly after.
The emergency room had light blue curtains shielding us from the outside hallway, and there were two black chairs that occupied me and her mother. There was a regular-looking hospital gurney that had extremely white sheets with fluffy cloud-like pillows on it, and there was sparkling clean medical equipment scattered throughout the room. It was nice to know that my best friend, someone that I cared about so much, was being taken care of.
But before I left the hospital for the night, I expressed how upset I was at the situation. Emily had never had surgery before, and I was worried about her. Someone that I was used to seeing and talking to every night would not be around for at least a few days.
The next morning, when I went to go see her, she was finally in a room and resting. However, the room was not the best and I was concerned that, since she had an open wound, it might get infected.
When I got there, she had awoken to the sound of the door opening, and said, “Hi, it’s nice to see such a friendly face. Isn’t my room disgusting?”
I agreed, “Yes, it is very disgusting, but at least you’re out of surgery.”
The room smelled of old moldy air, the walls were all scratched up, and the paint was peeling from the corners of the ceiling. There was one tiny chair in the room that was wedged between her bed and the closet door, and the floor tiles looked as if black mold was growing on top of them.
My best friend was not being taken care of as she had been in the emergency room. Her parents would only visit her after they got off work, so I stayed with her much throughout the day when I could. For two days, I never left her side, until they had to change her wound packing.
I stepped out of the room, but I could smell the bitter smell of the gauze they were using to pack her wound. It smelled of iodine that had been sitting in a closet for years.
I heard Emily say, “Wow, that hurts. Could you please hurry up so that I can go back to sleep?”
Even in the hospital, she was her witty self.
The day after her wound packing, she was able to go home. Emily had a very upbeat discharge nurse. Her voice was rather high-pitched, and she wore brown scrubs like the color of mud that had dried.
I was glad to see Emily go home; not only was this tough for her, but it was tough for her friends and family. We did not like to see her suffering, and all we wanted to do was get her out of the hospital so she could heal in her own bed at home.
I was able to cope with this traumatic experience by spending those days in the hospital with her, that helped a great deal because I was still able to see her and spend time with her. When you are used to something, such as being with your best friend every day, you never know how out of place you feel without them until they are back with you.