Falling, pt. 3

I've seen my Dad in hospitals before: somewhat groggy after a hip replacement, being feisty and ornery during a bout of pneumonia. The IV drip bag, monitors beeping as they measured heart rate, blood pressure and anything else the doctors felt necessary to check. No one ever likes stepping into a hospital room, but I felt that I'd experienced enough of them on my own that whatever I was about to see in my Dad's ICU room wouldn't phase me.

His room was much larger than I anticipated, fitting both his enormous bed, a day bed for visitors who wished to spend the night, and two thick, white columns affixed to the ceiling. The columns had electrical outlets grouped near the middle and bottom, and each column was affixed to articulated arms so they could be maneuvered about the room, moving equipment to wherever it was needed. Dozens of monitors huddled near the head of my Dad's bed, with plugs sticking into the columns while thin cables or wires flowed around him and ended in either patches adhering to his chest or fingers or entered the top of his head and penetrated a few millimeters into the brain. (One such device, called a Licox Monitor, determined how much oxygen the actual brain tissue held. The higher the number, the more oxygen allowing his brain to heal.)

IV bags of every size hung from thick metal hooks surrounding the bed, each one trailing a tube of fluid into an electronic monitor and out another tube into my Dad. The digital displays showed the name of the medicine and how much was being pumped into his system: versed, morphine, propofol, regular IV, even a thick pea-soupish yellow that was his food. The ventilator stood apart from them, off to the left, with its long crinkled white tube disappearing down my Dad's throat.

And in the midst of all the beeping, blipping, the moving about of doctors and nurses, my Dad rested on an enormous bed fitted with a monitor of its own at the foot. From the display the nurse could raise or lower the foot and head of the bed. Another button raised an upper corner, rotating my Dad to the left or right in in order to allow blood circulation and to loosed anything in his lungs. Another button deflated the mattress in case it was too stiff. Still another monitored his weight. All that from a bed! I joked that my Mom should buy one for their house.

The doctors and nurses didn't write anything down on clipboards or paper of any kind When it was time to change a medicine, he or she scanned a bar code on their badge, then another bar code on the IV bag and another bar code on a wristband attached to my Dad, and then set about hooking up the IV bag. When they changed shifts, they scanned the bar codes in again. They typed notes into a computer in the room and could check the notes or monitor equipment from the nurses station at the center of the ICU.

But the one touch in the room I especially liked was up in the ceiling. Directly above the bed and backlit, waiting for my Dad to open his eyes, was a photograph looking up at the tops of tress into the clear blue sky. Something calm and peaceful to be the first sight, rather than one of those holey cardboard ceiling tiles.