A Fist Fight With Cancer calls for a lot more

If asked every hospital administrator and employee would argue that the hospital environment they work in is quiet and patient friendly. But are they?

The word hospital is surely derived from the route word from whence comes the word hospitality. A place where people seek respite from illness and disease and who have the right to be in an environment that promotes healing and rest. Ergo by definition and conjecture hospitals must and should be places of rest and recuperation, of quietude and relaxation, of tranquility and calmness, of peacefulness and equanimity.

I have been a hospital patient one time in my life [1991] and I have visited others in hospitals many times in four states. Many times during my stay dutiful nurses would come into my room, wake me up and give me a sleeping pill. A machine was attached to my arm that recorded my blood pressure. Candor requires me to state that many hospitals are about as quiet as an elementary school lunch room and some are as raucous as a NASCAR race at Thunder Valley in Bristol, Tenn.

The hallways in many hospitals resemble drag strip races featuring the mop bucket brigade dash. The buckets have wheels that don't roll, some slide, several have flat places that bump and some clatter like that wheel on the grocery cart that turns like a propeller. The bucket pushers talk and laugh as loudly as shoppers at the hearing aid bazaar.

Staff are about as quiet as a prison riot. Outside every door to every room there is an expansion joint in the floor or where carpeting ends. Every rolling piece of equipment being pushed down the hall make sounds like highway rumble strips or a railroad car clunking on the rail joint. Beds, carts, mop buckets, food carts and cleaning personnel flow up and down the halls like cruisers on Main Street in small town America on Saturday night.

Doors bang and slam like hail on a sheet iron roof. People come in and out of rooms like customers in a DQ. They never stop. Many hospitals are so large they could be used as a rat lab for humans. It must be easier to find ones way through the Brazil rainforest than many hospitals. They have more hallways than the Pentagon

Recently our daughter was a patient in the hospital. She is having a fist fight with breast cancer and at this point she is way ahead on points going into the last round. A KO is eminent. Life may not be fair at times but that is life; an unending caravan of good and bad experiences that people must contend with. A successful life is dependent upon how we manage both the good and the bad circumstances that fill our lives.

With all candor I must say that Norton Hospital, Louisville, Ky, where our daughter was a patient is nothing like those described above. It is quiet, artfully decorated, modern and patient-oriented not staff oriented. The staff treated her with appropriate medical protocols, respect, dignity and professionalism. None of the abuses listed above were evident. This contributed to her rapid recovery.

Larry Vandeventer.

Go to my website -- Larryvandeventer.com -- and purchase my books.I grew up North of Calvertville and Graduated from Worthington High School and Indiana State.Contact me at Goosecrick@aol.com or 317-839-7656.