I'm one of those people who has never spent a night at a hospital. In fact, I am more familiar with the waiting rooms of hospitals than I am with any other space within such facilities. I consider myself lucky, in a way. To make it to a half-century without ever having had to check into a hospital for anything more than a blood test or an x-ray is a bit of a blessing. But with that sense of relief comes a sense of anxiety. How does one act as a hospital patient? Are those whom I've visited in hospitals models to emulate? Is it true that you will get sick if you spend too much time in a hospital because everyone around you is sick.
I have been in the emergency room as a patient twice. The first time occurred in 2000 on the day after I participated in my first -- but perhaps not last -- act of civil disobedience. I spent the night sleeping on a hard concrete floor at the Student Center at the University of Hawai'i in protest of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in the Rice vs. Cayetano case. This case almost seems like a forgotten footnote of race-based histories of the U.S., but it was an important case where racism and the marginalization of indigenous peoples intersected. In brief, the ruling held that state agencies tasked with the support of indigenous peoples -- like the state of Hawai'i's Office of Hawaiian Affairs -- could not legally limit its elections or its field of candidates to persons of Hawaiian ancestry. Like the recent affirmative action cases that have ruled that whites cannot be de-preferenced in efforts to racially equalize the playing field in such areas as college admissions, the Rice vs. Cayetano ruling opened the door toward a dissolution of the status of Hawaiians as an indigenous group and toward an equating of the term Hawaiian with one who makes that particular state their place of residence.
It seemed appropriate to protest this move.
Ostensibly the protest was against a proposed tuition increase at the state's university. In reality, the tuition increase would adversely affect Hawaiians particularly because a large number of scholarship funds and other endowments had been established to enable members of the indigenous group to attend the university -- which sat on former kingdom lands -- for free or at reduced rates.
In any case, I joined the protest, which wasn't a good idea for my future economic status (but that is another story), and slept on a hard concrete floor. The next day, I went to classes and at the end of the day prepared to leave my last class to meet a friend for coffee. As I bent down to pick up a backpack loaded with books, something in my back twinged, and I couldn't straighten myself up. There was someone else in the room so I asked him to call campus security while I lowered myself to the floor, thinking that I could stretch myself straight down there. I was stuck, however, in the "C" shape and this was before the era of cellphones and text messaging. Campus security arrived and radio'ed for an ambulance. A stretcher arrived, along with a hot pad and an ice pack, and a muscle relaxer, which I think was injected into my back. I was hoisted up, and wheeled out of the building. The medics nearly collided with one of my professors who stared in astonishment as I waved from the stretcher.
We went to the hospital, and after about an hour of waiting for a doctor, I found that I was able to straighten up. It hurt, but I could move. My partner (now my ex-partner) arrived to bring me home, and I discovered the consequences the next day of my political statement when I went into work.
The second emergency room visit was considerably less dramatic. During lunch on a Friday, I had gone swimming. I was still wearing contact lenses back in those days, so after the swim, I put the lenses back on. Over the next few hours, I noticed that my eyes seemed itchier than usual and that in fact a large amount of, well, let's just call it excretia, was emanating from them. I reported to work (by this point, they'd more or less forgotten about the political protest that had taken place six years earlier), and called my husband, asking if he could bring me my glasses. Over the next eight hours -- from 4 p.m. to midnight -- I wiped my eyes with tissue and edited newspaper copy. After we put the paper to bed, I asked my supervisor if I could leave early so I could go to the emergency room because it seemed that I had picked up an eye infection. I spent the next three hours in the emergency room waiting for someone to look at my eyes. An antibiotic was prescribed, and the problem eased. I went to see my regular eye doctor the following Monday and he asked me why I had gone to the emergency room. It seemed like an incredibly odd question, given the fact that eyes typically do not shed excretia, just tears.
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