Mad Woman of the Ward

After striving to be the epitome of grace and serenity for low these past 2 months, after having nurses tell me I am the coolest mom they have ever met, the Charge Nurse "threaten" to hire me, and a doctor tell me it is a pleasure to watch me with Leo; I hit the wall. Although the docs are treating us with a tad more deference, I suspect I now have a bit of a reputation.

Hospitals are not empowering places, and, with their litany of policies and arbitrary rules, they are no place for a couple of Bohemian-radical-nonconformist-pagan outlaws like Leo and I. And making the litany of policies and arbitrary rules even more maddening is the fact that every hospital employee we encounter seems to interpret them differently, so nothing is consistent. Then there are all the crazy-making issues that crop up: one doc told me, in the hours after Leo's surgery, to plan to be released from the hospital by weeks end; other docs have said to expect to be here for month.
We have had 5 rooms over the past 6 weeks, and where, early on, the accommodations struck me as similar to monastic cells, it now strikes me as more akin to a prison cell, or perhaps the Hotel California. We are both SO ready to go home.

The quandary is, Leo has a long road to recovery ahead of him, and yet hospitals are not proper places to recover one's health, and yet in this culture it is bloody difficult to find the better alternatives that doubtless exist.

In a sense, the fact that our insurance company has already made clear that they will not pay for follow up care is freeing: it releases up into the great wide open of possible healing paths. Once Leo is fit to travel, he and I will head home, into the arms of our community of support, to his naturopaths and other healers who can shepherd him on his way back to health.