The main lobby of hospital where I go for my hyperbaric treatments looks like a lodge. It was inspired by Timberline Lodge, a destination dear to a Northwesterner’s heart, and is intended to ease the stress of illness and caregiving. The light is beautiful, the fire is always roaring, and sometimes music from the baby grand piano infuses the atmosphere.
I go through this lobby on my way to and from the hyperbaric center, and since my treatments are painless and infused with optimism, my anxiety about visiting the hospital has lessened considerably. It a bit like going to work.
But that beautiful lobby doesn’t fool me. No matter how much it invites one to settle it, take a load off, grab a moment of solace, the grand room can’t take away the raw business of the hospital: death.
I can’t view the lobby without thinking of the cancer diagnosis I received upstairs, or the surgery I had. I think of my dear friend Steve who also received his cancer diagnosis upstairs, and his brain surgery, and the days I spent with his posse rallying around him in his beautiful hospital room. The trauma for everyone was piping hot.
Everyone who boards the elevator to or from the lobby is riding toward trauma, from birthing babies to brain cancer, and people are kind and soft. We acknowledge each other in a way that is sympathetic without prying. Compassion rules the holy elevator.
The other day as I left the hyperbaric center feeling light and airy, a loud but dulcet-toned message went out over the PA system. “Code blue in intensive care. Code blue in intensive care.” Someone crashing upstairs.
Someone won’t make it out of here alive. And the rest of us live our lives, we keep moving through the lobby. I feel the weight of the hospital floors above me, but I hold that stranger in my heart as I step into the elevator.
