I first walked through the doors of
this hospital so long ago. The years have passed in a single breath.
I spend so much time here, it seems like I never really leave.
Patients are rolled in and rolled out. More patients have come and
gone, most of them successfully, than I care to count. So many
patients use this hospital that they were able to afford a major
expansion.
New wings of the building with fancy
new machines and operating rooms with the equipment to allow doctors
to perform all the advanced new techniques. The new rooms and fancy
hallways meant the older wings would be used less and less.
Eventually, the hospital bigwigs stopped sending patients down these
halls and putting them in these rooms. Janitorial would only send
someone to clean the floors as a hazing ritual for new hires.
Maintenance would park inoperable gurneys and other pieces of
equipment in the vacant halls while they waited for parts or an order
for disposal. I was the only one that still regularly walked these
hallways and entered these rooms.
I guess I shouldn't say that patients
were never put in these unused rooms. Sometimes an intern would
mislabel some transfer orders for a comatose patient or a doctor
would want to temporarily “relocate” a patient that was healthy
but still being difficult. Then they would be put in a room and I
would watch over them. I would discuss their condition with them
even though they generally were in no condition to hear me.
Eventually, the intern's mistake would be uncovered or the doctor's
nerves would have settled and someone would come to collect the
patient I had carefully watched over. They would be would be
returned to the normal, active, upstanding, shiny new areas of the
hospital.
Even though it was rare for patients to
be placed in the rooms I watched over, I was not alone. Many former
patients would greet me in the halls. We would discuss many topics
of the day. The weather, the local scholastic and professional
sports teams, the latest entertainment releases. Conversations with
these friendly souls did wonders to diminish the omnipresent boredom
and silence when there were no patients for me to visit during my
rounds. When a particularly difficult case would come under my
watch, I would sometimes ask one of these former patients to visit
and speak with the patient while I continued with my rounds. I will
never get a chance to see follow-up reports or read dismissal charts.
Because of this, I can't be certain if my efforts have any actual
impact or not, but I believe strongly enough that it does good that I
will keep on doing it as long as the hospital keeps accepting
patients.
****** ******
*******
“Sir, I know you asked me
not to report this any more, but it's happening again. We've had
patients saying they have heard voices while in the older wings of
the hospital.”
An older doctor sighs
heavily. His impatience and exhaustion with the topic obvious.
“Jensen, we will go over this one more time. The original wing of
this hospital is unused and only rarely entered. Any patients that
say they hear voices there are experiencing drug induced auditory
hallucinations. We've sent out a number of memos requesting that
patients no longer be placed in those rooms. If we are still getting
reports of voices being heard in that wing, it seems those memos have
gone unheeded. It seems we must draft a new one immediately and make
sure every one pays attention. We must not let rumors grow that this
is a haunted hospital.”
“But sir, these patient
stateme.......”
“This is not a haunted
hospital! There is no ghost of a doctor that died from a stroke
while on his rounds. While patients have died in the long history of
this facility, their spirits do not roam the unused halls. The
patients that reported these voices were experiencing a side effect
of the drugs that had been administered to them. This is the last
time we will speak of this. If you mention it again, that will be
the last words you utter as an employee of this hospital.”
Have you ever had an odd dream during an illness or while on one medication or another?
