AncienTrails

Spring                                                              Bee Hiving Moon

An oddity for sure.  Bill in the hospital.  Ruth in the hospital. Kate in the hospital.  Judy Wolf in the hospital.  Frank going in two weeks.  A popular place to be.  Oops, and as he noted, Tom next Thursday.

These semi-secret places have an unusual and ubiquitous place in our lives, usually reserved for moments we’d prefer not to have.  Behind operating room doors, in intensive care units, in emergency rooms the lives we cherish can be saved by robed priests and their acolytes using tools we rarely see and chemicals we little understand.  It is also here where many of us end the same lives, our bodies failing beyond the powers of medicine to heal them.

The modern hospital is a maze of corridors and elevators, lobbies and treatment rooms, operating theaters and vast caverns filled with boilers and roofs dotted with huge HVAC machinery.  They are the contemporary labyrinth, difficult to navigate and with so many different Minotaurs down so many hallways.

The smells are antiseptic and there is a ritual emphasis on cleanliness, foam in, foam out, yet it is in these places where the deadliest virus and bacteria live, the very ones that have begun to outstrip our armamentarium of antibiotics and and anti-virals.

It is difficult to approach a hospital without at least a vague feeling of dread because they hold this anomaly:  Seen from within by their functionaries these are places of healing, but experienced by those of us who come to their doors seeking succor, we bring with us not the memory of victories won, but of final struggles lost.

Here the aura of the medical profession is at its strongest; its strict hierarchy shown in uniform colors, places of work and cars parked in the lot.  Cultures have always valued those who commune most closely with the gods of the age and the physician in our age knows the grimoires of our bodies.  Using medicine and machine and the knife they cast the spells that fend off the ravages of age, the trauma of accidents, the insults of disease. And we respect them for it, hold them in a bit of awe.

Cling to hope all ye who enter here.