by LJ Innes

Created on: September 18, 2010   Last Updated: September 30, 2010

Not to jinx myself, but up until now my personal trips to the hospital have been limited to two times, once when I was five and had my tonsils taken out, and last year when I had a dental issue that made me look like I swallowed a huge gumball and got it stuck in the side of my face.  Still, going to the hospital, for any reason is something I dread.

When someone calls me and says a friend or relative is sick and in the hospital, selfishly, the first thing that comes to mind to ask is, “how long will they be in there.”  I’m, of course always hoping for, “a day or two” which would give me the free pass to have an otherwise pressing engagement that I just can’t get out of.  It’s not that I don’t want to be there for the people I care about, I just totally 'skeeve' hospitals.

You would think that hospitals would be the cleanest places in the world, but the truth is that they’re the incessant cesspools of germination we all feared was sitting in that petri dish in high school science, only on a much larger scale.  There’s sick people everywhere.  You could go in with a broken leg and come out with pneumonia for goodness sake.

Not being known for their powers of discernment, germs don’t just attack the resident guests of St. Elsewhere.  They are unprejudiced in their search of healthy cells and therefore, the visitors who are there to comfort the sick become the recipients of a more equal opportunity. 

The waiting area of the emergency room is the absolute worst, because you’re always there at some ungodly hourly, forced to wait, sick or healthy, in the same room as sneezes, sniffles, coughs, exposed bones and heaven knows what else.  Just thinking about it gets me woozy.  The fact that your usual emergency room visit last hours, always, just compounds my palpitations with anxious breathing.  Then I fear that I’m sucking in way more than the usually allowable amount of germs a body can handle. 

Germaphobe?  That’s right, I’m a germaphobe.  I’m the girl who shows up to visit you in the hospital in July, wearing her turtleneck sweater over her face like Bazooka Joe, wafting otherwise unwanted puffs of pollen-rich flowers in front of her face in the hopes that germs are also allergic to pollen.  Also a few pollen-induced sneezes strategically placed in the conversation, allows me to get in and out in record time.  All of this of course, was perfected over many years of visits.  

It doesn’t really matter which floor you’re on, at least not to me.  Whether you’ve broken an arm or had a bypass, I consider your floor to be a war zone.  Germs travel.  Through elevator doors, onto other floors, in stairwells and on carts, germs travel.  If I go to the front desk to get a pass to your room, I grab it with the extra long sleeve of my sweater, but most times I just slip onto the elevator and ask someone how to get to your room number.  Yes, I call ahead to get as much information as possible to formalize my plan of action. 

All I know is that, God forbid, I ever have to go to the hospital as an overnight guest, and you feel like visiting me, you can just go straight to the floor where the pharmacy is located, closest to the anti-anxiety section.

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