I Am Here...!

Silently the large glass doors glide open. You enter, legs moving you forward at a halting, unfamiliar pace. You feel small, vulnerable, not who you really are at all. Who are you, then? A compact, grey-haired woman of six-score and more, well-lived and -loved for whom life has assumed a new dimension of huge uncertainty.

A short turn in a corridor, then a cavernous room and choices confront you, vexingly. Turn one way, a long wall of glassed-in offices, reception to this vast enterprise of healing for unanticipated maladies. On the other, open hallways leading elsewhere in the bowels of this enormous place. Here, though, are the rows upon rows of seats occupied by mute, absorbed waiters, reflecting on pain, predicament and the virtues of stolid patience.

You hobble self-consciously to the glass wall, there to uncertainly state your purpose: admission; suspicion of heart rebellion. And you weep, ill-done by, for you have placed such trust in that organ, as faithful to it as you presumed it would be to you. You seek along its length for some indication that here - or there - or over there - sits an admitting nurse. Some questions; crisp, kind, professional, and you are swiftly bundled into a wheelchair in the waiting room, set aside for a moment to contemplate, alone, the heavy, bleak darkness of this morose day - anxiously scan the area for view of that beloved face.

Alone, you weep, and heads turn slowly in a tide of enquiry. An elderly man detaches himself from his vigil to tentatively approach, offering his wan concern. Suddenly, you are gliding across the smooth stone floor, a quiet, soft-voiced orderly steering you down long hallways wide with people striding purposefully, focused as living cogs in the great machinery of the medical-health restorative enterprise to which you have now appealed.

You feel forlorn, abandoned by assurances for the future. Welcomed into a small curtained space, lying on a hospital cot, cold with uncertainty, the grey cast of the day increasingly grimmer as the space becomes flooded with attendants.

Nurses bustle about, preparing a plethora of mechanical, electronic devices, while a doctor hovers, quietly probing mind and your memory for intimate details, and at the same time manipulating the body which is yours alone. You may feel alone, but you do feel a sense of professional capability and obvious concern, eliciting from you trust in this place and its busily-engaged people.

Trembling with exhausted anticipation, nervous tension, fearful of the near future, you hear a voice rambling quietly on speaking a professional short-form known to other professionals and become aware of the entry of another medical professional whose immediate, visceral concern for your well-being manifests in a repeat, as the new interlocutor hazards experienced interpretation of your symptoms. The small room is dark and heavy with their conclusions.

Within the constricting cocoon of your faltering physical presence and friable state of emotions, and despite relief at the presence of these medical experts within the shell of a modern, technologically-advanced place of diagnosis, treatment and healing, your spirit has delved within a deep dismal interior space; dark, unfamiliar, disorienting and damned.

A quavering voice, barely recognized as your own, pleads "where is my husband?"

And suddenly a miracle: the curtains part again and the room is brilliantly illuminated as the sun of your existence strides toward your bed.