Getting back in the swing of things…
I’m back on the east coast, though I won’t be back in New York until Wednesday. Jenny’s dad was moved into a private room, out of the cardiac ICU, and seems to be recovering steadily, if slowly.
It’s odd, trying to get back into the rhythms of regular life after a week of completely irregular life. I find myself thinking about the daily schedule of getting up, going to the hospital, visiting hours, getting lunch, visiting hours, passing some time, getting some dinner, visiting hours, then going home and sleeping, and I have a hard time wrapping my mind around the fact that this is still happening, only a few hundred miles away. It feels like a different planet.
It seems to me that the daily routines of the hospital, the visiting hours and the rules and the jockeying for adjacent chairs in the waiting room all help to make a completely terrifying and unsettling experience a little easier to manage – you can step entirely out of your life into the alien world of the hospital, and deal with a medical crisis mainly in that context, rather than immediately having to grapple with the fact that this is real life. It seems hardest to handle things when you’re talking with people from outside this bubble – that makes everything seem more real, and more unbearable.