Hospital-ity

Note: Thanks to all bewdas for the overwhelming number of comments on the 3-part Xena posts. It was especially heartening to see such a large number of lurkers/first-time commentators sending their good wishes to the gundi. Please pardon the delay in responding to the comments. I have just finished replying to the emails I received. I will, of course, be responding to every comment.

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More snippets from Xena's and my hospital stay

- Since I was in the hospital for a month with not much to do, I got really friendly with the nursing students. I remember one particular pair that had just started their internship that day. As expected, they were not given anything important to do. They were so bored they would come by and chat with me every few hours. "We have nothing to do!" They would lament. The next evening, they popped by my bed, looking super excited. "I reckon someone gave you some work?" I asked. "YES!" They said. "We just changed the diapers of TWO babies!" They said, almost breathless with excitement. I was so amused. Talk about crappy jobs!

- I hated the hospital food. But the good thing was that you could actually order the kind of food you wanted (Chinese, Malay, or Indian), so I kept trying different combinations to see if I would finally get something to my liking. I didn't, but one fine morning, I took the lid off my "Indian vegetarian" breakfast and almost fell off the bed with delight. Luckily the gazillion probes and sensors that bound me tightly to the bed prevented me from falling off. One of the medical students attending to me that morning stopped in the middle of his speech, eyed my plate enviously and said, "Is that pav bhaji????" Muahahahahahaha!

- The babies in the special care nursery had name tags on their cots. All babies were identified by their mothers' names, but there was a blank for the baby's name too which parents could fill if they wanted. The baby boy next to Xena actually had 'Superman' on his tag! I am not kidding you. We found out later that he was one of twins and the father had temporarily named them 'Superman' and 'Batman' for their SCN tenure.

- During one of the classes we took on caring for premature babies, the speaker wanted to say, "All visitors must wash their hands before touching the baby." He ended up saying, "All visitors must wash the baby before touching the baby." It looked like only Viv and I got it. Needless to say, we nearly fell over laughing in the middle of the class.

- Just before my surgery, the anesthetist held a slab of ice somewhere on my skin to check if sensation had indeed gone off and the surgery could start. "Sayesha," he asked, "Can you feel that?" I responded with a "Feel what? Where?" He laughed his head off and then said, "Okay then, that settles it. We'll begin."

- One of the cleaners in the ward took a real liking towards me. And like many people, she assumed that just because I am Indian, I could speak Tamil. She would talk to me nineteen to the dozen in Tamil and I'd pick up key words and nod along. She was really surprised to see me stay for so many days and one day she told me something strange. From the keywords and gestures, I guessed that either she was talking about someone who ran away from the hospital or she was advising me to run away from the hospital (an option which I did consider at one point). Anyway, I nodded along. The next day she came in, looked at me and said, "Still here?" Hmm.. So I reckon she had asked me to run away then?

- During kangaroo care, Xena would move her hands and legs a lot. One day, the alarm started beeping very loudly because her heartbeat was showing a very low number. DONG DONG DONG! went the alarm. The nurse came running, took one look at the number on the screen and immediately picked up the baby to check what was happening. It turns out the naughty girl had nicely peeled off the heart rate probe from her chest and stuck it -- guess where? On my chest! The nurse couldn't stop laughing.

- In a similar 'pin the probe' game, she had stuck it on her diaper. This time it was a doctor who noticed the strange numbers and checked. "Oh so that's the diaper's heart rate!" Both of us said at the same time! Heh heh! A doctor after my own heart.

- When Xena was moved out of the incubator into a cot, she was finally given some clothes to wear. All this while she had just been in a diaper. They put on what they called a 'baju' (Malay for 'shirt/top'). She was still so tiny that the baju reached her ankles, making her look very much like Yoda. I could totally imagine her rolling her eyes and saying, "Fashionable this is not."

- Once in a while, they also put on a cap for her. There was this one particular cap that came in a ghastly shade of orange, which was probably meant for an XXL baby. It was so big for Xena that they had to roll up the edge like a thousand times before it fitted her head. I swear she looked exactly like Shah Rukh Khan in Paheli.