the hospital

27 December 2009

The hospital has not been so bad. I leave tomorrow. It has been a pleasant respite, especially as I reread my earlier dire diary entries bewailing “the end of this” and ‘the end of that”. This afternoon, walking along the Kamogawa, a river next to my ward at the Kyoto University Hospital, I felt enchanted in the late warm afternoon at the New Year’s Holiday.

“The sun rises in a different place everyday,” one of my three roommates said as we stood by her southern facing window at a quarter after seven in the morning. We can see the sun rise and set because of the closeness of the time to the solstice. In spring or summer, the sunrise would not be visible from this window. I was delighted to meet a fellow enthusiast of the sunrise, and to understand her Japanese comment by familiarity with its content.

In the care of a terrific two teams of nurses and doctors, decent food, daily walks by the river, I welcome the comraderie and am happy to contribute to daily entertainment with sketches.
A trombone player practices by the gurgling rivers; a wide variety of people cross river in both directions along the stepping stones; my flower vase of crysanthemums and fruit basket of tangerines and bananas are full of color and scent and shape in the necessarily antiseptic room.

I finish reading my alumni magazine, and leave my read paperback Madame Bovary as the first English entry in the small library. A nurse draws a map to an Internet café after the promised Internet connection on Floor Four of the hospital is found to be off limits due to security regulations. I edit a batch of students’ English language essay for a colleague, a paid sideline to my university teaching. I dress every morning and head into the small “office” on Floor Four to read students’ essays, gaining amusement and insight.

When I call to announce my imminent release from the hospital, my landlady immediately tells me my cat is healthy, a relief because I had dreamt of hearing him crying and lost.

Perhaps I was the one who was crying and lost. The week in hospital I think has helped me with more than chemotherapy.

I write new year’s cards and mail them; other patients and nurses do the same.