False Lullabies

Thursday, October 23, 2008

After hours, the hospital hums a false lullaby. The road rage nurse has finally stopped jabbing your baby with needles, and her sobs have finally subsided into a stone-heavy sleep. The other little girl in your room has finally stopped throwing up from stress; her parents are no longer shouting to each other across the room or banging large metal things around. (Are you the only parent in Italy who thinks children should have a peaceful environment in which to sleep? Sheesh.) You are folded up on a blue plastic chair for the night. Though you are exhausted beyond all reason, sleep will be hard to come by.

You wonder when—or if—your roommate will turn off the late-night action flicks, though maybe quiet is too much to ask in a building that never rests. You mentally calculate how much time you have before the nurses burst in to flip on lights and take temperatures. (Not enough.) You watch your baby breathe the sterile air, needle-sharp with disinfectant. She is so fragile tonight—pallid, dehydrated skin sticking to tiny ribs—that you feel afraid to touch her, yet it takes all your self-control not to scoop her out of her crib and cuddle her the whole night long. You try to decompress. It proves impossible.

At last, the TV is off, but the resulting quiet is as menacing and green as a storm warning… and it really isn’t all that quiet. Somewhere down the hall, someone else’s baby screams. Operating room doors bang shut, and feet scuttle to and fro outside your room. Even your chair squeaks in opposition as you try to find a comfortable pose. (There is none.) All the mistakes and anxieties of your life converge on you at once, and you can’t summon the energy to bat them away. It doesn’t really matter though, because in two minutes, a nurse will wake your daughter up, and you will spend the rest of the long night trying to get her back to sleep.

If you ran a hospital, you think, you’d have dimming lights and soundproof walls and whispering nurses tiptoeing around in vanilla-scented socks. At 9:00 p.m., everyone would get a sleeping pill with a mug of chamomile tea, and the TV would automatically switch to old-school Coldplay music videos. Every patient’s medical chart would include a prescription for intense rest. You reflect that your common sense is apparently some kind of revolutionary medical secret; does this make you the smartest person in the hospital?

Perhaps the tiredest, at any rate.

—

Update: We are finally home safe and sound now after Sophie’s hospitalization for gingivostomatitis and the resulting fever and dehydration. Our plans for the evening include SLEEP.