Deck the Hospitals

Eleanor's followup visit to the horsepital was far calmer, and yet even more surreal, than the initial rounds the other night.  We'd been told to call today to make an appointment for today, and when I did so shortly past 8 a.m., they said, basically, come on down! We got directions to outpatient registration, with the promise of further instructions from there, since we'd never find it anyway.

Not long after registration, we were sent down the hall to the Burn Unit proper, its clinic not being open on Mondays, and boy were they right about the Never Finding It part. It was a good quarter mile walk around probably the entire girth of the hospital's first floor. I speculated at one point that they put it so far away in hopes of the flames being out by the time the patients arrived.

The main waiting room back there was large, populated and with the omnipresent turned-on television, but we were instructed to wait in a smaller one just outside the entrance to the unit proper. No television, one loo, two chairs, maybe 100 square feet tops, and about 300 degrees of heat- just what a burn victim looks forward to. So we moved our chairs out to the hallway and Eleanor was called in straightaway.  No fewer than six people- from MD's to orderlies- told me that I could use the waiting room behind me, but I told them that I was keeping it open in case the BPD needed to interrogate a criminal or something.

Before long, my beloved was out- rebandaged, given a scrip for improved telfa pads and some hand exercises to keep the blisters from blistering in the wrong spots- and we were directed to the full-service pharmacy in the ECMC Mall for our final stop of the day getting the new pads.  I'd seen this setup a few years ago when a client, then working in their radiology department, had a mortgage refinance appointment there, but it still kinda boggles- to leave the world of House and take an escalator right into Dawn of the Dead. There's not just a billing office and a gift shop, but a Subway, a Timmy Ho's, two other burger and pizza shacks, and in our case, a choir. Every weekday from now until Christmas, a school or church chorus/choir/band comes in to bring holiday cheer to the off-duty medicos and the waiting-for-Godot patients and outpatients. There was something utterly surreal about seeing Santa, and hearing Adeste Fideles, not 1,000 feet away from where my wife was being nursed back to good health.

Everybody seemed to be of good cheer- especially the pharmacy cashier, who made a point of heading out into the atrium of the "mall" a half dozen times to track down all of her customers, more by face than by name. She, and they, did a better job of getting Eleanor fixed up with what she needed than even Wegmans did when I called in one of my meds for a refill later in the day.

Two client meetings, one store visit and a tree-climbing cat later, the day is done and dinner will soon be served. Christmas still comes, whatever the state of your fingers and palms.