On the weekends almost all of the patients in my program at pulmonary rehabilitation go home. For the first five weeks, I did, too, but this last time it was recommended that I stay in the hospital as my wife and son at home had a bad virus.<\/p>\n
And so I did.<\/p>\n
The place, stripped to a skeleton staff and now loosely populated by the permanent residents– most of whom were confined to wheelchairs of varying complication– was pretty empty. The days, now shapeless and free of plot, offered little and so I wandered hallway after hallway. Seeming more memory than music, the theme song to MASH drifted from one room I passed,<\/p>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n while another was antiseptic and empty but for Trump\/Pence banners taped defiantly to the wall, and then through a doorway, I caught a glimpse of a nurse changing a patient’s tracheotomy tube– so intimate and tender as to be virtually erotic. Downstairs, scattered like islands, I came upon people who sat anchored and voiceless in wheelchairs, each one stationed near a window, watching.<\/p>\n There was a church service later in the morning that took place in the same space that hosted Bingo, Pub Night and all our other events. It was Catholic, which occasioned a few religious props being removed from a box and placed on a cafeteria table, and somehow this act was achingly beautiful.<\/p>\n