My dad and I drove to Brooklyn recently to pick my brother up from a hospital after his hernia surgery. He'd been putting it off for about three years. When we first arrived, we separated to use the bathrooms in the packed lobby. I still have flashbacks about the stench that slapped me in the face when I pushed through that swinging door of doom into a steam room with toilets. Just in case you're ever considering a remodel - do not put a toilet in a steam room. The smell, the smears, the lack of toilet paper and seat covers were not what I expected from a hospital. Sadly, it was also the only room with a heating system.
We were referred to the post-op recovery room for day surgeries where a hand sanitizer container hung on the wall in front of the door with a sign attached insisting that all visitors sanitize their hands prior to entering. It was empty and I notified the nurses in the recovery room. They said they'd take care of it. I watched a variety of orderlies, nurses and doctors jam their hands under it and then make rubbing motions with their hands, pretending to coat themselves in cleanliness. Visitors to the recovery room were not allowed to sit down. My father mistakenly sat down in a reclining chair next to my brother's hospital bed and was immediately yelled at by an attendant that it was for patients only. We didn't actually plan on having to sit down in that hospital. We expected to pick him up by 1pm and get the hell out of there, but at the last minute, the anesthesiologist talked him into a spinal injection or epidural or something for the surgery instead of the gas, telling him he could chip a tooth, and we couldn't take him home until he could walk again and feel the lower half of his body. We had to come back every hour to find out if he'd magically regained use of his limbs and he didn't until 5pm. The hospital was dumpy and so was the surrounding neighborhood. There weren't waiting rooms or seating areas to speak of, and our hands were dirty, so we had to kill time in 55 minute increments for five hours.
We found a conference area with administrative offices and wooden benches in the hallway. We sat there, facing each other on the bench, until I saw something disturbing just behind my dad. He could read that immediately with the look on my face.
"Oh god, don't tell me. Is it something awful?"
"Yes. Horrifying."
"Like a little kid with all kinds of tubes and wires or horrible burns on its face, or no face?"
"No. It's a rat running around behind that plant."
"Oh. Ok, well that's fine. Geez why are you even surprised? I'm not."
A large potted plant was up against the wall and two little mice ran around in between them, frolicking in the filthy wasteland that was the hospital. They weren't actually giant rats, I over-estimated. My dad called them "therapy mice" to cheer up the patients.
Personally, I go to the doctor as little as possible. Many times, if you feel sick or injured, you can just wait it out and it clears itself up. That is my good advice to you. Google is also really helpful. Turns out my husband is a massive alarmist when it comes to this sort of thing and when I first started having stomach trouble a couple months ago, he was all worked up because he was sure it was cancer. He pressured me to go to the doctor with guilt trips and hysteria because it just had to be cancer. Also turns out he thinks everything is cancer. Whenever I leave a medical appointment and I text him the results, he responds with "so nobody thinks it's cancer?" Oh yeah, I also lost 5 lbs in under two weeks giving up gluten, dairy, soy and high fructose corn syrup. Turns out all that shiz makes you a fatass.
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