I have just spent some three weeks as the spouse of a hospitalized patient. The first two weeks were spent almost exclusively in the hospital with the exception of those nights spent in a motel trying to catch some sleep, showering, shaving, and changing clothes. Hospitals are not completely novel environments for me; I spent the first decade of my career working in one. I now work in an outpatient medical setting and find that the job takes me into hospitals and nursing homes on a moreorless regular basis. What was foreign or novel about the past three weeks was my role in this setting or context.

I found that I kept thinking about Army basic training and how my memory of those days and that experience was so familiar to what I was experiencing right now. I was in a role in which I had not previously been for more than one week. There was all kinds of uncertainty on all fronts as medical staff worked to stabilize one aspect of care after another. There was absolutely nothing that I could do to change the situation in which my wife and I found ourselves at the moment. And I was dead dog tired. I have often found that fatigue is a very interesting lens with which to view real time experience. I seem to lose the ability to contextualize the experience, to modify its impact, and most certainly to control or limit my emotional response to it and the immediate expression of that emotional response.

I can only surmise that the way in which I experienced the past three weeks and the experience itself (Is it even possible to separate the two?) will have a substantive impact on me well into the future.