Going Up!!!

 

We’ve been spending a lot of time in hospitals lately. My son Brett has had four operations in and around his brain in the past six weeks. The surgeries were followed by stays in the ICU (intensive care unit) and a few weeks in a rehabilitation facility. All of which allows me to generalize a little—hospitals are scary places. They have a look, a smell, and, most of all, a sound all their own.

I thought I had experienced most of the hospital sounds over the past few weeks. Bells, alarms, beeping monitors, loud hacking coughs, cheery nurses, and more. Then I heard something different and a little exciting during Brett’s most recent stay. When we entered the elevator on the ground floor at NYU Hospital, a recorded voice said, “Going up.” Nothing surprising there. But I could swear the words were spoken with an upward lilt. It sounded something like this, “Goooooing uP!”  Not to be outdone, when we entered the elevator on a high floor to start a downward journey, the voice said “Going down” with a little bit of a descending tone, like this: “GOOOing DOWnn_nn.”

 

Movin' on up...

Now this may have been my imagination, but I know what I heard. I also see a metaphor here. There is a happiness when you are going up, even if it’s to a hospital room. And if you’re a visitor coming to see a friend or family member, even better. You’re on a mission of hope and joy. When you leave, you might be a little down. After all, you have just experienced being in a hospital!

We are all happy to be hospital free for the near future. There will be some scans to accompany Brett to on a regular basis and perhaps some other potential procedures down the line. Who knows? A lot is unknown when you are dealing with hospitals, no matter how many monitors, and dials, and tubes, and X-ray or CT or MRI machines are there to demystify the unknown. Good health is a precarious thing, as my mother-in-law often wisely noted. She put it this way: “As long as you have your health. . .” She often left the rest of the sentence blank, but we knew just what she meant.

I am happy to report that, for now, Brett has his health. And that sounds pretty uplifting to us.