...So it was a rough flight across the Atlantic going west - I ended up on the floor of some cold and moldy central Ohio basement replete in dog hair. My allergies kicked in and my gut flared up and I found myself in the ER and from there on some Information Control and Redirection Floor on the Orwellian Unit of the Hospital Kafka. It was my first night in there and I wasn't just woozy from the gut, the pain meds were kicking in and I was finally feeling like myself again. And I slept on some upper floor of a not so modest anymore high rise hospital with a view of the not too distant downtown skyline out the window. It was the first time I had been comfortable since departing the Southern Lowlands of a Surrealist Kingdom in Northern Europe.
...At some point in the night I was awoken by a Doctor - except it wasn't any Doctor I had seen during the ER intake or once I was moved to the Information Control and Redirection Floor. Its all vague mind you - I was exhausted, had been in quite a bit of pain so I was really out of it. I remember the room, the windows - the view beyond the reflection of the lights from within the room back into it. I remember this Doctor without a name and unlike all other doctors that day he wasn't nice. And I mean he didn't even bother with the veneer of niceness to mask the unbridled masculine ego that Med Schools across the nation turn out year after year for those who can pass tests and carry on through those grueling weed out programs. I don't know who this Doctor was or where he came from or who he actually worked for - or even if he was who he said he was - I saw him twice that I can't recall in that pharmaceutical and pain haze. The cluster of Nurses who went through my room on rotation didn't know him when I inquired and I over heard two of them conversing about the handsome older mystery Doctor who they had witness visit me. They were clearly alarmed at not knowing who he was. Alarmed that they didn't know from which floor. I remember this Doctors bedside manner or lack-there-of - He just asked me these questions in an American version of a Gestapo technique - though not even with a toothy smile - of course I cannot remember none of his questions but I remember how difficult they were to answer or how uncomfortable those questions made me feel - It was after dark - that I remember. He came by the bed and didn't tower over me the way Doctors do. He bent or kneeled down so he was next to me in some Reptilian way. Painfully close. I remember keeping an eye on his hands and my IV tubes - he didn't scan my plastic ID bracelet. I remember being very affected by his questions, irritated then mad then shamed by him with his innuendo's and implications. In short it wasn't even as if he were trying to get information out of me so much as to intimidate me with his very being there.
Still the greater worry to me to this day is the conversation between two Nurses in my room later at the foot of my bed still in that long winter night somewhere between Christmas and New Years. The fact that he was referred to as this mystery Doctor - who had access - who knew his way around and yet was not supposed to be there.
The fact that security Agents can slip in and out of Hospitals and do their work and that as the patient your defenses are less than the thickness of the plastic walls of IV tubes and catheter plugged into veins - less than all the bureaucratic security protocols within that industry - How easy it is for some such Agent to do some task assigned to them by who know what kind of higher ups from who knows where. And for me this is the true fear of Hospitals I have. Not the various killer strains of this clinical bacteria or virus spread so easily in Hospital climates through staff and visitor lazy based negligence. And that this sinister work could all get carried out so seamlessly. Organs could be harvested and sold off as you lay dying and the Hospital staff you've come to know and appreciate would be none-the-wiser.
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