Hospital Beds

At least eleven people can squeeze into a mother-baby room at the local hospital. 

Four of them are small—they fit on laps or in the bassinet at the foot of the bed—yet they take up the most space. Their little fingers peel circles from sticker sheets and fix them to everything in the room. My shirt. The pullout couch where their dad has been sleeping. Their baby brother. 

I enthusiastically accept the stickers, pasting them to the “Visitor” nametag on my right shoulder.

My husband holds the baby. Cradles him against his broad chest and gazes down at the flushed cheeks and conical head, still bruised from birth. 

“Do you need more water?” I ask my sister-in-law. She’s seated in the hospital bed, wearing a pair of soft navy pajamas, and I can’t help but think she looks like a queen on her throne, soft and strong and beautiful. Several brown lunch sacks decorated with clumsy marker strokes and stickers—gifts from her kids—wait in her lap to be opened.  

I take her water jug from the rolling table next to the bed, slip out of the room, and pull the door shut behind me, walling off the family chortle. I breathe deeply for the first time since we arrived. 

I’ve spent a lot of time in hospitals in my short life—at least for a healthy person—but I’ve never been to one for a happy reason. Until my nephew was born. 

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It’s hard to know which memory of a hospital is my first. The earliest ones are filmy and flaking around the edges, but I believe it was somewhere around second or third grade. 

A friend of mine from church, a dark-haired girl named Autumn Lee, broke her leg in several places—the injury was severe enough that she had to stay at the hospital for a few weeks, maybe even months. 

We brought her a balloon, one of the shiny foil ones with something akin to “Get Well Soon” scrawled on both sides in primary colors. My mom and I rode the elevator up to her room and set the balloon in the corner near the other paraphernalia—stuffed animals, flower arrangements, photographs. A few coloring book pages and drawings had been tacked to the windows. 

She lay in the bed with one of her legs suspended in a hammock. The contraption looked uncomfortable and crude—like something from a horror movie. There were pins in her knee, keeping it stable, and I wondered how she got up to use the bathroom or sat up to eat. Mom explained later that she didn’t—the nurses had to help her with everything.

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Later in my youth, when I was a senior in high school, I took a trip to the hospital by myself to see Papa. My grandfather’s health had been in decline for years, and he’d been taken from his nursing facility to the hospital for what we all understood would be the last time.

I drove over to Greenville Memorial after school one day, and followed the signs to the intensive care unit on one of the upper floors. Pie-wedge-shaped rooms lined the perimeter of the circular ward, and the nurses’ station sat in the very center, giving the staff a 360-degree view of their most precarious patients. 

Papa lay in a hospital bed. He’d been over six feet in his prime, but the man in the bed was small, shriveled, and misshapen. Yellow tinged his skin, and the paper-thin covering was painted with bruises and liver spots. A light dusting of white hair stuck straight up on the top of his head.

He’d been thoroughly tucked into the bed, and an assortment of tubes and wires protruded from his body: an oxygen tube at his nose, a heart rate monitor clipped to his finger, an IV in his arm. His wedding ring barely hung onto his shrunken finger, and when the nurse stopped by to check on him, she handed it to me for safekeeping. I slid it onto the leather cord of my necklace and wore it over my heart. 

He passed the next day.

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I returned to the mother-baby room after refilling my sister-in-law’s water to find two of her kids in the bed with her, helping her open gifts—clementine oranges and drawings of their family. 

Around dinner time, my husband and I walked the older kids back down to the car with their Nana and Papa. My six-year-old niece held my hand, and we ambled through the sterile hallways to the elevators.

There are very few happy reasons to be at a hospital, but life entering, rather than exiting—or trying to cling to—the world, is a good one.