Disconnected

Over the course of our hospital stay, I had a bunch of little ideas that probably aren’t each worth their own post, so here they are, all jumbled together:

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The food at the Women and Infants’ Hospital cafeteria isn’t bad, for cafeteria food, but the food that gets delivered to patients’ rooms is actually quite good, for hospital food. My advice to partners of post-partum women: ask the Food and Nutrition people for a menu to order a guest tray up to the room while you’re hanging around. It only costs $6.

Also: if you’re planning to stay overnight in your partner’s room, do yourself a favor and get an air mattress. The nurses will happily provide you with a spare set of sheets. The fold-out chair thing that they provide has only a passing resemblance to a bed.

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You find a good number of men wandering the halls of the hospital. When two of us found ourselves waiting for the elevator, we would greet each other with a furtive glance towards the other’s left wrist. On seeing the tell-tale hospital bracelet, we give each other a comradely head-nod (what a friend from college calls the “Pez-head”) or, if we’re feeling more gregarious, a world-weary, “Hey, man, congratulations.”

In such encounters, when I pulled my hand out of my pocket and flashed my two bracelets, I confess I felt like a total bad-ass.

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A hospital is a noisy place. Pretty much every piece of machinery in the building hums, buzzes, trills, or beeps. On a number of occasions (such as listening to Rachel’s IV pump loudly beep in a futile attempt to tell us that her saline bag was empty) I wondered how the staff would ever be able to tell when something urgent came up. Wouldn’t all the beeping just drown in the general clamor?

One evening on a stroll back from the bathroom (Rachel’s room had a bathroom, of course, but it was separated from the main room by nothing more than a curtain, which didn’t provide the level of privacy I require) I found out. A loud three-note tone sequence like nothing I’d heard before came over the intercom, followed by a woman’s calm voice:

“Code blue. Labor room eighteen. Second floor. Infant.”

The tone and message repeated three times and then went quiet. Now, it’s too early in this parenting process for me to pull any crap about how, as a parent, I found the announcement especially harrowing. I’d only been a parent for a few days, and I think I’d have felt a chill up my spine even if I didn’t have two tiny babies waiting for me just down the hall. But I’d be lying if told you I didn’t rush back with a little more urgency to scoop them up and make sure they were OK.

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