You’re In Absurdville When:

1: The hospital’s admitting desk is across the hallway from its chapel.

2: The scent of extra virgin olive oil reminds you not of cooking, but of treating your family for head lice.

3: Your spouse is the patient, but you’re the one wearing disposable hospital underwear.

4: It’s 2 a.m. and you’re driving across town to a third 24-hour pharmacy because the prescription provided by the attending doctor at the hospital is for a pain med dosage not commonly stocked at pharmacies.

5: The hospital doctor you’ve been waiting all day to see walks into the room and says, “So, what’s the plan?”

6: After weeks of sleepless nights writhing in pain, your loved one has finally fallen asleep in her hospital bed with the help of I.V. pain meds only to be awakened by an orderly who enters the room, flicks on the light, and announces it’s time to change the bedding. Seriously?

7: “Seriously?” has become your most common one-word phrase, question, statement, and threat.

8: Therapy is kneeling in your yard, feeling out wiry clover and creeping charlie chutes with your finger tips for the instant satisfaction in having control over this moment of finding and pulling and removing, finding and pulling and removing.

9: Your freezer is stocked with five pans of lasagna.

10: A win is having contracted the MRSA virus and now you get your very own room when admitted to the hospital 🙂

11: You’re lonely but you stop answering the phone.

12: A walk through your neighborhood grocery store for the week’s necessities is no longer a task but a savored, multi-sensory experience that ends with bags full of prizes.

13: You realize the practice of Medicine is more of an art than a science.

Copyright © 2020. Russ Stark. All Rights Reserved.