Hospital Scenes

There is a long and narrow hallway that runs along the center of the ‘old’ hospital, the part that contains the cafeteria, gift shop, library and administrative offices that once housed the medical school. We have a new medical school, now, a gleaming and bland carapace housing equally gleaming and bland classrooms. Of course, it’s always glass: glass, glass, glass everywhere. Makes you miss solid building materials like brick*.

Today, while walking quickly down that hallway, I almost ran into a young boy and his mother. He had trouble walking, he moved slowly on his two legs, each leg bent in toward the knees so that the knees kind of knocked against each other when he walked. White bandages covered the calves. “Two more weeks, only two more weeks,” I hear him say in a voice clear and childish, full of, believe it or not, a kind of mirth, a burbling happiness that you hear in the voices of children, and all this while he struggled to put one foot in front of the other.

It makes you humble, it always does, the things you see around here.

*Okay, I know the building is solid and up to code, but I am trying to make an aesthetic point, here.

Update:  Aww, kids are beautiful, here is a video of some Iraqi kids. I don’t know what I think about the Iraq War anymore, but man, are these kids adorable. (via).