I don’t know about you, but I harbor an extreme dread of hospitals. This dread arises from a lifetime of unpleasant, even tragic, encounters with hospitals where my closest loved ones were treated.
If you’re a member of the medical profession, I commend you and your devotion to medical care, often in hospitals. Nurses are especially commendable! I just have a different point of view.
I’ve been pretty lucky myself. So far. My lengthiest hospital stays to date stemmed from the births of my two darling daughters, for whom I’m grateful every day. So no regrets there.
And I’ve been delighted when my daughters themselves gave birth in hospitals to three healthy grandchildren.
But those other encounters with hospitals have been terrible episodes in my life, and I’ve dreaded the day when I might have to return to a hospital as a very sick patient myself.
Since last weekend, however, I have a whole new outlook on hospitals. Why?
Chatting with my five-year-old grandson Jamie while we were visiting a playground together, I warned him to be careful or he might get injured and have to go to the hospital. The “hopsicle?” he asked.
Okay, I need to put this into some context. We’d just walked over to the ice-cream truck that had arrived near the playground, and I’d bought a “fudge bar”–what I thought would be a vanilla ice-cream bar, coated with chocolate, impaled on a stick. But I was handed something else. When I unwrapped it, I said it looked like a chocolate “popsicle.”
So Jamie may have had popsicles on his mind when I mentioned the hospital, and he thought I said “hopsicle.”
Truthfully, I’m delighted that he did. Thinking about a hopsicle is a much happier thought than thinking about a hospital. From now on, I will try to think of hopsicles instead of the dreaded hospitals.
And I will be forever grateful to Jamie for relieving me of a terrible burden: Contemplating that I may end up in a sterile hospital room someday, possibly during my last few days on Planet Earth.
Even knowing that I may very well end up there someday, I plan to squelch my dread. Instead, I will smile about going to the hopsicle!
susanjustwrites
Susan Just Writes 