Nobody likes hospitals. They smell bad and they're full of sick people and sadness and beeping. And I hadn't planned to be in one &- there was no day spent steeling myself for all that upheaval, like, "Are you ready to sleep on an uncomfortable bed and eat only gravy for the next five weeks?" "Totally!" So upon arrival in my small, sterile hospital room, barren of the comforts and familiarities of home, things seemed grim. And it would have been eminently possible to just let the hospital be the hospital and stew in homesickness every day I was there. But, as is always the policy in times of trouble, you can't just roll over and give up. So we &- my parents and I &- didn't. And we didn't just get by, either. We moved in.
My last three weeks were spent on the window side of my double room at the rehabilitation hospital, which meant I had a windowsill, which meant, finally, that we had room for all our stuff. It seems as though the reaction among everyone I know was either "she must need chocolate" &- which is a topic for another day &- or "she must need activities." When we initially arranged our belongings along the windowsill and around the room, we had a lot of get-well cards, three small glow-in-the-dark dinosaurs, a few stuffed animals and a giant bag full of what looked to be half a Toys R Us. We spread these things out along with flowers and food, positioned them precisely how we wanted, smiled at them from the bed and chairs.
But as the days wore on, we accumulated more and more stuff, from Silly Putty to more dinosaurs, from a variety of different versions of all the "Harry Potter" books to a latch-hooking kit. The windowsill started to fill up faster. Certain items from the toys and games assortment were relegated to the gift-baggy depths from whence they came. Simultaneously, we kept out the Play Foam (I am not kidding) and offered it to guests, so that by the time my discharge date finally rolled around we had a veritable Play Foam city snaking through all the other stuff on the windowsill, like an acid trip in a coral reef made of Dippin' Dots.
Meanwhile, we went native in other ways. I took several naps accidentally wearing pieces of physical therapy equipment, and came, resignedly, not to mind too much. My mom picked a couch in the lobby and sat among the patients there when she had to leave my room, trying to blend in. Sometimes she went there for work, other times to doze off like an old person in a mall. Dad chained his laptop to a booth in the cafeteria for use as a secure home-away-from-home office and stayed there all day &- and moreover, he returned to the same booth the next morning like a sea turtle magnetically finding its way home.
Our crowning achievement, though, probably rested with those first few dinosaurs. We had five by the end &- triceratops, stegosaurus, T-Rex and two that we referred to as anvilhead and bumphead. They're only about an inch high, but when you have five of them and they glow in the dark, the possibilities are pretty much endless &- and on top of that, we had glow-in-the-dark Silly Putty too. By their powers combined, these things became the most awesome diversion in the room.
Every day, someone (usually Mom) rearranged the dinosaurs in some little prehistoric tableau in and around the Silly Putty. One day, a watering hole ("drinking pond," she called it) &- another was a "death swamp," with all the dinosaurs (predatory or otherwise) mired in the primordial ooze. Once, the dinosaurs ate from a poisonous patch of Silly Putty vegetation and then staggered away in varying states of illness. A hill was attempted up which the T-Rex could chase its more vegetarian-oriented fellows (maybe it could have turned into a "Land Before Time" scene if it had been successful) but the sun through the window pretty much turned everything into the same overall ambiance as the famous "death swamp."
Between the dino scenes and the Play Foam jungle, or maybe it was all the chocolate, the nurses were always interested to see what new weirdness awaited in my room every morning. What with all the decorating and the fact that they gave me a physical therapy schedule every morning, it was almost like camp &- fairly macabre camp, anyway.
The room where I stayed smelled antiseptic &- the adjustable bed was finnicky, the shades perpetually up and the lights painfully bright. But we filled it with color and random bits of nonsense so that at least I wanted to sleep there every night. The food in the cafeteria wasn't home-cooked but we embraced it. What choice did we have?
Plus, let's be honest &- Play Foam is pretty sweet.
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