The lounge that is also my bed is bottle green. Oh bottle green, the colour of torture. It sits to the right of her bed and grins at me, with large gaping mouth, the monster, who will steal what is left of my sleep.
The floors are a beige linolium, just perfect for catching various bodily fluids from small, unhappy children and boy, there seems to be alot of those about this place.
We are inside our little room though. The room that keeps the everyday germs of the hospital environment out. The room I have come to (lovingly) know as the ‘room of hell’.
This room is small but it holds in it alot of emotions.
Worry, fear, hope, exhaustion, happiness. Sometimes it seems so full that I think it may combust and the sea of tears past, that are quietly spent in the corner of the room, as the parents watch and wait for their babies to be well, may flood the corridors of the ward and send cots and highchairs floating away, along with drips and oxygen masks and such.
This room harbors sick children, sometimes contagious, so as to keep the germs in but mostly the compromised.
The world outside this tiny room is busy.
The nurses bustle up and down the hall, tending to the needs of the sick and their parents, doctors and social workers and other staff have quietened conversations about room such and such, fully believing that they cannot be heard, children cry and call out, to parents, who have gone for a break, for parents who are absent…
Machines beep and whir and whisper secrets to the walls, of antibiotics, pain relief, oxygen supply and fluid needs.
Cleaners come and go, buffing and polishing, people with food trays, orderlies who sweep in and transport patients for xrays.
The world outside is constantly moving.
The door to the outside (incedently, also bottle green) stays closed but there is a small glass window, just inviting enough that it calls you to cast your eyes, sometimes just to look, sometimes on a wish that someone may come to relieve the monotony of the four pink walls.
I often wonder if we are some experimental family and the room is a cage, where observers can look inside to see and research.
The doctor comes, but once a day and he is swift and kind. Gentle with the child who is lying still in the oversized bed, that makes her body look more tiny and frail than it should.
The crisp white sheets crunch as his hands move over every body part, checking for everything and nothing.
The only diagnosis that is clear is that we will need more time in the room.
He leaves and I am both angry and sad, also; relieved.
He has no idea that he is our lifeline, our ticket to freedom. I would never say how much the sick child’s parents need their doctor, how important he is in this quest to make her better. It would seem too…needy, somehow. Instead I look to the door and plan our escape.
The family joins us briefly and it is wonderful and overwhelming all at once, this tiny room, now full to overflowing with humanity. The air heats up with each breath that is pulled and pushed from nine sets of lungs but it is a welcome change from the sterility of the room.
Nurses come and go, their lives in fast forward for eight hours of their shift. I feel as though we are unmoving as they whiz around us; the girl in the bed and the sentinel mother. Silent, watching.
She is pale and her eyes tell a story. A slow acceptance of her reality.They do not dance today, in toddler merriment. They look blankly at the pink walls. Unseeing, or maybe, she has found an escape and is in a magical land of all the things she loves, far away from the blandness that is the room. Who knows, she is uncommunicative, lost in her own world. I am her occasional cuddle, when she needs another human.
My head hurts from little food and even less water. The flourescent lighting drills into my brain, bleeding it of any last intelligence. I look around to the green things; a chair, a door and a sick bowl. None of them trees. none of them living, breathing, life maintaining things.
I want to go outside and feel the Winter chill on my face. I want to take her and run, push her on a swing, so high, that she can see into tomorrow and know that there is one and that it is far better than anything that I can offer her today. I want to give her that hope. I want it for me too.
Instead I look to the walls, in their suffocating shade of mushroom pink and wonder if tomorrow will be the day that she will come good and we can leave this place, so needed and yet so unwanted, behind us.
