Anyway, I digress… My hate-hate relationship with hospitals. It honestly doesn’t have much to do with my childhood hospital residency, come to think of it, as every member of the medical personnel has always been deeply caring and overwhelmingly invested with me. They kept saying I would become a doctor… Of course I would! Well, I sort of did: I’m a social worker by university standards (ok, almost. Music got in the way and I never finished the last few credits missing for me to get my diploma). So, as a kid, I never felt that spending numerous Christmas seasons at the hospital was sad or depressing; it was life. I often wondered why my parents were crying when they visited me every day; crying when they’d see me, crying when they had to leave (which was always way past visiting hours — the 5-year-old me already had some very bad influence on the whole system. Becoming a doctor? Maybe. A rebel? Most definitely!). When you are a child, your situation isn’t something you care about (maybe I should have), and my reality, as illusive as it might have been, wasn’t felt with the seriousness it must have commanded. My concern was about my folks crying all the time, as I thought I might have done something wrong, but, no, I hadn’t; I was simply severely ill. There was no wrong involved… Until you fast forward to the 13-17-year-old me. Then, I knew that not only was I doing all sorts of “something” wrong, I was the eponymous of “wrong”. But hey, I had some “life” to catch up to, right?!

I think my perception of hospitals was mostly impacted by the sickness and deaths I encountered at a very early age. It started with all the kids “disappearing” from our shared room, followed by their visitors screaming their pain at the top of their lungs. I’ve learned the notion of someone being with Jesus before I actually knew the guy himself. My deeply beloved grandfather Henry died when I was 6. My grandmother Manse died at 57 when I was a preteen. My grandfather Jack died when I was 13, around the same time my aunt passed away from cancer at age 42. And on, and on, and on… I know death is part of the cycle of life, obviously. You can measure that notion of rationality as an adult — until it hits you right in the heart, I suppose. In my case, it was being with my father when he had his last breath, lying down on his hospital bed. He departed at age 61, after a cancer that hadn’t been identified early enough following years of wrong diagnostics. “It’s in your head, Mr. Foster, no need to worry.” No, it wasn’t. It wasn’t in his head: it was in his pancreas, his prostate, his lungs, his glands, and pretty much everywhere. Not bad for a missed call… But that’s an easy take on my part. For every wrong once in a while, there’s an endless quantity of rights that save lives. It just hurts even more when you stand on the tragic column that is the wrong call, and logic doesn’t prevent emotions from destroying you inside. The loss of my father left too much of an unbearable heaviness within me to allow any of my cerebral acuity to provide me some rational comfort. You learn to accept, but you never truly heal.