I organized a nice trip to Las Vegas: flights, transfers, hotel, shows…the works! 20 people signed up! I had planned to accompany the group, then instead of returning with them, I was to take a leisurely drive to San Francisco and then down along the coast to Los Angeles. From there I would have taken a flight to Santiago Chile. There was even talk of a cruise to the South Pole at one point.
But on the departure day, with suitcases lined up by the door, there was a medical emergency and I had to forego the trip.
So instead of pictures of roulette wheels and slot machine, I have stories of I.V. drips and blood pressure machines, wheel chairs and bed pans. Not the high drama of an emergency room, not the sweet smell of new born babies in obstetrics, not the tension of cardiology…only the dreariness of hemato-oncology. It does not take long to realize that a missed trip is a very small deception compared to the sufferings you can witness on such a ward. There is the man who has just had his second leg amputated and is on dialysis. They keep him sedated because as soon as he regains consciousness he starts to scream at the top of his lungs…There is one guy who looks just like Archie Bunker’s son in law “meat head” . He always wears a ski jacket over his hospital gown and I could not quite understand why until I saw him outside the main entrance smoking a cigarette…he has lung cancer. There is the nice woman in the yellow bathrobe with no hair left because of chemo therapy…There is the handsome tall dark haired young man who was just told he has terminal cancer….There is the strange woman with a mysterious illness who sounds retarded but is a whiz at scrabble …There is one woman who is always at the pay phone, although there are phones in every room, describing her husbands every bowel movement in great detail for everyone to hear….There is another who keeps coming out of a room crying, she blows her nose, wipes her eyes and goes back in, over and over…
You see pain, you see sadness, you see indignities…I guess I could have seen the same in Vegas, but I hear it was very cold there this weekend…so maybe I was better off here…
