Hanging Around Hospitals

Sometimes we've caught people, particularly health care professionals, off guard with our knowledge of medical vocabulary.  I remember one time I was talking to a nurse and referred to going on a "course of anticoagulants."  She assumed I was in health care because your typical layman would have said "the doctor put me on blood thinners."

None of us are medical people; we just hang around hospitals a lot.  This doesn't make me an expert by a long stretch and in fact my brother, who IS a hospital nurse, will occasionally throw some vocab word at me just to keep me guessing.  I did look up "titration," though, because he uses it a lot to describe his job.  He spends considerable time titrating.

But I've been a vocational minister for twentysomething years and have done a lot of hospital calls, and both Adored Wife and Social Hurricane have spent significant amounts of time in the hospital themselves.  You pick things up.

Things I know about hospitals:

1. Hurry up and wait.
2. You can always tell a hospital administrator--they're the ones wearing professional business clothes and tennis shoes.  (These good folks walk a lot.)
3. Most people who work in hospitals are happy to help you with quick things but they don't have time to stand around talking to you.
4. There are plenty of opportunities to wash your hands.  Use them.
5. If the people in the waiting room look happy and tired, somebody's expecting a baby.  Otherwise, nobody's happy to be there.
6. Following along with that, if you find yourself in the waiting room and you have an opportunity to show some compassion to someone else, take it.  They can use it.
7. The doctors, nurses, and staff are almost always busy with important things.  They don't mean to make you wait, but they've got things that have to get done.  I suppose there may be a few lazy ones here and there, but they're in the very tiny minority.
8. If a member of the hospital staff seems grouchy, chances are good that they're just exhausted.  Be kind.
9. Hospital food varies widely in quality from place to place.  Some of it's actually pretty good.
10. The people who designed the signage usually did so with the idea that the people reading it would be calm, well-rested, and coherent.  This is isn't typically the case.
11. If you're lost, ask for help.  The hospital staff have seen lost people before.

Hope all's well out there, friends, and God bless.