Hospital food is an atrocity.<\/p>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n I had a long stay in the Toronto General back in October and it wasn’t much fun. You feel interred when in hospital, and for a quite a stretch there it seemed as if I didn’t have very much to be encouraged by. The days, enveloped by a fog of confusion, frustration and dread, were very long and very slow, and I found myself looking forward to dinner, imaging it might be a little clearing in the woods. However, nothing could have been further from the truth.<\/p>\n The meal, delivered wordlessly by a stranger in a hair net, would arrive with the loveless flat, slap of a plastic tray. The food itself, alien, was a visual insult, a slushy confection that had been poured from one container into another, a reminder that you had absolutely no control over this life you now inhabited. I found it all inexpressibly demoralizing, so I began to order food in whenever I could.<\/p>\n I wasn’t much good at providing the delivery service accurate information about how to get to me. The Toronto General Hospital is a monster. It goes on forever, in every complicated direction and level you can imagine.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n It’s disorienting, like a space station made by a long extinct civilization, and having been moved a half dozen times since my admittance, I didn’t have any practical understanding of where I was. I simply could not give instructions as to how to get to my room. I didn’t have a clue.<\/p>\n All the same, I was in a ward with three other men on the 14th floor of the thoracic\/respiratory wing of the hospital, and it took the delivery man ages to find the place. He must have travelled all over the hospital, unwittingly engaging in a tour of all the grief and suffering tucked away there from public view.<\/p>\n