The Third Floor

I'm writing this shortly after a visit to Baptist Hospital South to see my sister, who had surgery to repair a broken femur this afternoon. She's going to be just fine.

The orthopedic ward is on the 3rd floor. You go up by elevator, you exit them and go through the doors to your right, and at the end of a little hallway -- at the first "intersection" just next to a private sitting room where boxes of tissue rest on every available surface -- you take a right....

No. That's not it.

If you take a right you will wind up at the doors of the MICU. You walked that way so many times for so many days that muscle memory just came into play, and although you realize you meant to take a left at that intersection, your feet keep walking toward those closed automatic doors, your hands begin to reach for the disinfectant pump containers mounted on the walls, and it is only when you allow yourself to face the fact that her room now holds some other mother, maybe, some other person whose family you had a hard time making eye contact with when you got off the elevator and saw all the MICU families hovering there waiting for their own limited visiting hours because they looked like wounded animals just like you and yours did when you sat there, waiting...   well it's then that you remember to turn around and head the other way.

The way that leads to the room where your sister is, where she will spend a few days recuperating, and taking some measure of rehab, and leaving from there to go home not much the worse for wear ultimately. The way that reminds you with each step that life is going on, that for every heartbreaking story those hallways could tell, including your own, stories of healing, and joy, and medical miracles great and small are being told there, too.  Right now. And your sister will be one of them, and this time, a woman you love deeply will come home from that 3rd floor.

And you are grateful to have felt, and moved through, another little landmine.