Sunday, August 12, 2012

An old woman in a hospital

It took me a while to find out what it was about and why she was there, but I couldn't really believe it.

She was an old woman lying in one of a few beds in an intensive care unit of a small hospital.

She seemed to be sleeping most of the time. Maybe once an hour a nurse came and put the flexible tube  through her mouth to the upper part of her lungs to take out the mucus. A procedure which hurt quite a lot, and so the old woman often groaned.

Every few hours the nurses turned her around in the bed or tried to talk to her, but she usually didn't say anything. She just laid in the bed and didn't do anything. Just sleeping. Maybe she was dreaming, maybe she had a lot of memories which made her feel good. I don't know.

I finally found out by listening to what the nurses said that she came voluntarily to the hospital twice a year, because here it was better for her than at home. Here she didn't have to do anything, and the nurses took care of everything.

Nevertheless I wondered a lot why any person would ever enter such a room like this one voluntarily. My only goal was to leave this place, and I counted every second.

When the nurses came to me with the tube to clean my lungs, I wanted to run away but I couldn't move my body at all, so I just watched some of the patients dying in this special room, some of them leaving to a different hospital, and one of them - the old woman - enjoying it. I never understood it. I just don't want to be like that when I'm old.