by Szilvia Adler

Created on: July 03, 2010

It is just like any other day at the hospital. It is ten minutes before seven o’clock; the hallway I walk through is deserted. The doors are open; in the well-lit rooms, patients are either sleeping or stirring without making much sound.

The janitor’s cart is in the middle of the hallway, packed with disinfectants, wipers, mops and all other necessary tools she has available; all that can be bargained and afforded by the indebted hospital.

The air is salubrious, preserved by the night’s touch and untenanted by today’s sizzling hot weather. I heard in the morning’s news, they’ve ordered a third-degree heat alert – for the first time. I wonder what it will be like without air-conditioning, but I’ll get the sense of it as the day will draw closer to its inflection point.

All the familiar faces are on their beds; some open their eyes as I walk by, my flip-flops making shuffling sounds unintentionally. It is a winsome wake-up call, since in the next twenty minutes, after I changed into my working clothes, I will walk by, wake them up, check their pulses and give them their daily medications.

As I reach the nurse’s desk, the brown phone on the counter remains deadly silent, reminding me of nothing like yesterday, when it was ringing ad infinitum. The transfer of numerous patients due to multiple car accidents has transformed the hospital to frenzy yesterday.

The glass board on the left-hand side shows the names of the patients in each room, dissipating and growing by day and I stop for a second.

I can smell the disinfectant as the cleaner is washing the floor in the kitchen area behind the nurse’s desk. Beside the kitchen, but still behind the place where all the arrangements are made, is another little room, where the unpacked medicine stays, until administered to patients.

I see my favorite nurse at the front of the intensive unit of neurosurgery and I greet her, then I head into the storage room, where I undress and take on a nice-looking, freshly washed but with a tinge of disinfectant, bright green – sometimes ripped – uniform.

A person is a holistic “entity.” By holistic, I mean being connected to the world and wired within the body as well. If one malfunctions, its effect impacts the other. Balance is only restored, when the counter effect can be found and the system is at peace.

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