We're All in the Hospital

I write to you from the busy cafeteria of a hospital. It’s Christmastime, even here in Cafe 601 where doctors, nurses in scrubs, hair-netted staff, mothers, sons, and daughters like me sit, eat, guzzle coffee, and go about our day. We who are not in scrubs and masks and hair nets, we are the odd ones. We wait and watch. We stand out as the non-medical staff here. They know us. We know them. We eat our soup and nervously tap our feet, regularly checking our notifications for updates.

And I am among them as I wait for another phone call from my mother’s surgical team. I watch and observe.

The nurse in a “Cat Mom” ugly sweater.

The elderly couple who shuffle to a table to eat breakfast.

The tired med students. A cheery resident. That anesthesiologist fellow who I met five hours ago in my mother’s surgery prep room. He’s eating his lunch now. My mother is asleep in an operating room somewhere in this building.

I spot someone I know from church. She hugs me and tells me that she is there all day if I need her. I notice an old acquaintance who I haven’t seen in more than 20 years. I wonder if she recognizes me in my 4:45am frazzled hair, no makeup, oversized Adidas sweatshirt. She is as perfectly beautiful and put together as she was those 20 some odd years ago. I tug at the edge of my tank top under the sweatshirt and try to sit a little taller in my seat.

And for hours, my sister (who has now joined my people watching) and I sit there. It’s hard to not listen in on the FaceTime call happening just down the table from us. Someone is a first time mom with a baby boy. Chaos ensues. Her friend laughs.

I guess I write all this to say the hospital cafeteria feels a lot like a small microcosm of the world. If I sit here long enough, I feel like I will witness every version of humanity in some small way.

And so I keep watching — the doctor at a table alone with her cap still on her head. She closes her eyes and takes a deep, drawn out breath. I can almost see the weight of the world lift from her for a short moment before her shoulders drop again. I watch the nervous mom with three young kids as she attempts to wrangle their anxious energy. Dad is in surgery. They only have one car. I know this because they were there with me this morning at 4:45 am.

We are all in this together.

We’re all waiting, watching, looking for an update. The pain is widely shared — between those who do the work, who watch the monitors, who wield the scalpel — between those who wait for good news, who fear the bad news, who watch the clock as each tick drops a grain of sand. Some of us are eating salads; some of us are eating buffalo chicken wraps. Some of us are praying and stirring in our seats; some of us are laughing so hard, tears are dripping from the edges of our eyes. But we’re all here. We’re all in this cafeteria, here together, with one goal in mind — we all want to go home. Even more so, we want to go home with the ones we love. We want to go home having done our work well.

We all know we have to be here;
we all want to leave.

The doctor calls. My mother is out of surgery. She’s in recovery, one step closer to going home.

“That makes sense why we saw her anesthesiologist at lunch,” my sister says. “She was already done.”

As the day darkens and the floors quiet down, after I’ve seen my mother alert and awake, it’s now time for me to leave. The passageway to the parking garage is cold. The floor is damp and puddling from thawed ice and wet boots. Someone is already holding the door for an elevator headed up, and so I step on. A man holds a small, whimpering child in his arms, and the young boy rests his head sideways on the man’s shoulder. He cries slightly and the man, who I can only assume is his father, rubs his back gently.

“You miss mom, don’t you?” he asks. The elevator is creaking up to the next level.

“Yeah,” the young boy whimpers.

The elevator has now settled into a quiet grief. I can almost reach out and touch their pain. I’m filled with questions and then the door dings. It’s time for me to exit.

We’re all in this together. We all want put the pain behind us. We don’t want to leave anyone behind.

So if you’re feeling this today — the waiting and the pain, the cross section of Christmas trees and Mariah Carey singing somewhere, and an exhausted surgeon and anxious father, the laughing parents and the grieving children — consider Christ. There’s a warm invitation for all of us in the hospital cafeteria. For the hair nets, cat moms, parents of toddlers, nurses, fellows, residents, grandparents, grandchildren, sisters, best friends — we’re here together. And it would be helpful for us to see each other. To pay attention. There is something better for each of us and it’s found in the arms of the One who made us, gently hearing our grief, holding us when the elevator ride feels cold and icy. He wants to hold us. He wants to comfort us. He knows our grief.

He knows our need,
To our weakness is no stranger

Behold your King. He intends to carry us home.