Anyone who knows me even a little bit knows that my sense of direction is worse than horrendous. I have joked for years that I’m a homing pigeon for the wrong direction, that I get lost in my own backyard, that if I suggest we should turn one way at an intersection, we clearly should turn the other way instead.
So navigating this hospital continues to be a challenge for me, even after essentially living here for the past nine days. There are elevators everywhere, but somehow not every elevator gets to every floor. One elevator’s third floor button, in other words, does not actually get me to the third floor that houses my mom’s hospice unit. Not sure how many third floors there are, but I do know that this one bends and turns until somehow you’re in an institutional cave where hospital beds go to die. A hospice for hospital beds, perhaps?
Back to the elevator situation.
There are patient elevators (lifts with more tolerance than your average elevator?) and visitor elevators (just passing through?) and they don’t seem to go to the same place. On both of these elevators, the ground floor is not actually the ground floor, and levels of subterranean depth are designated by little symbols (there’s the clover floor, the heart floor and the star floor). I wonder if there is an inherent significance about each symbol — perhaps clovers are luckier than hearts, but hearts are deeper than stars, and stars are much shiner than clovers?
Anyway, pushing buttons is an exercise in hope and mystery: Where will I end up?
Walking through the hallways, you tend to be assailed by doors suddenly flying open or closed or people appearing around corners holding styrofoam trays of cafeteria “food.” I know there’s only one hospital gift shop, but I seem to find myself arriving at it from a range of different routes every day, which makes me wonder if there are, in fact, more than one. I also know there’s a Subway sandwich shop here somewhere — sometimes, stepping off one elevator or another, I catch sight of it, like a mirage of goodness on the horizon — but I can never find it when I want to have a footlong ham-and-turkey for lunch.
It’s sort of like being at Hogwarts Castle, where the stairs randomly reposition themselves or you have rooms that only open when you need them.
I am beginning to get the hang of the place, but still think it might be a good idea to bring a pack of bread crumbs with me to help me find my way back. I still get lost all the time. I turn the wrong way off the elevators at least five times a day, which means I often end up in the heart and organ transplant ward instead of the hospice. Once when looking for the cafeteria, I stumbled into a Catholic mass happening in the chapel downstairs.
I am holding out hope that I won’t wind up crashing, half-asleep, into someone else’s hospice room, but as the days drag on and my exhaustion deepens, the likelihood of failure becomes ever higher.
I’d be no help, Julia. I get lost in any building whose shape contains more than four sides. Elevators baffle me, too, in part because they add another dimension to the maze. Your writing, though, continues to sharpen and dazzle, even as you’re explaining your own confusion.