Anything for a quiet life
I'm a bit late coming onto the Interwebs today.
It all really started yesterday morning when I was woken by the dog very gently and politely tapping on the bedroom door. Now she normally just barges right in [without even knocking] and settles down to sleep on my legs so I can't turn over in the bed any more. Yesterday was different though so I had to heave myself out of bed at the ungodly hour of six, to see what the fuck was up with the dog. She very plainly told me she wanted to go out outside and underlined the urgency of the situation by making some rather revolting puking noises.
I let her out.
She vanished down the estate somewhere.
I couldn't go back to bed while she was out so I hung around and waited.
Eventually, I realised I was wide awake so I got dressed. No sooner was I dressed than Penny arrived back at the door to be let in. As a result I was knackered all day yesterday, while the dog spent the day happily sleeping off her one-off vomit session.
Now some people would go to bed early the following evening but sadly that doesn't work for me. If I go to bed early, I just toss and turn. The only way I can catch up on sleep is to have a lie-in the following day.
Except that today I had to get up early for a hospital appointment.
So there I was, at the crack of dawn belting up the motorway while still half asleep.
Now the appointment was in the Beacon Clinic which is a nightmare of a building as I have discovered in the past, so I had to leave plenty of time to get lost. And get lost I did. I spent a happy half hour wandering around the great cavernous building which is like a cross between a shopping centre and an airport, until I eventually found the right door amongst a thousand other identical doors.
So I am home now, nearly six yoyos lighter for the privilege of parking in their car park [and there is no parking anywhere else for miles], and to put it mildly, I am bollixed.
How come if I visit Doc I always feel cheerful coming out but if I visit a hospital or clinic I come out feeling a thousand times worse than I did entering? And it wasn't even my appointment – I was merely driving.
If anyone wakes me early tomorrow I'll have their guts for garters.
And that goes for you too, Penny.
If it was herself you were chauffeuring I trust all went well?
She's not too bad, thanks. It's basically a 100,000 mile service though she's leaking a lot of oil and what sounds like piston-slap, so I reckon she may need a new cylinder head gasket, or even a full rebore. I'm seriously considering getting a trade in for a much newer model.
It's the atmosphere of the place that influences you. People leave "impressions" (emotions?) in the structure of a building, something I firmly believe. So…
In the doc's office (someone you know rather well…or not) you're in a building occupied by a doctor with his/her own practice. Someone who can pick and choose their own patients or even decide not to take any more new ones, and are usually rather well off. This all makes for a generally happy contented individual which rubs off onto the doc's staff and the patients as well. And these folks leave their mostly happy contented impressions within the structure of the doc's office. This is what you feel when you visit.
Unless the doc is a rotten asshole which is usually not the case. Not if the doc wants any sort of guaranteed future.
However, in a hospital, everyone from doctors to nurses to bedpan changers are generally overworked and underpaid, doctor's included. And the doctors are buried under reams of documents and forms that they are required to fill out every single day for every single patient never mind things like keeping up patient records and/or actually taking care of their patients. These doctors also usually work only for the hospital so they have take what they get and usually what they get is a lot of flack–the nurses get even more.
Did you ever notice that absolutely no one in a hospital, staff and patients alike, are ever happy? From the emergency clinic to the recovery ward everyone is mostly tired, miserable and generally numb.
Anyway, I'm not defending or prosecuting here as far as hospitals go or those that work in them or make use of them. My point is that all these people in these institutes of medicine also leave their impressions in the walls and halls of a given hospital and these impressions are definitely not happy contented ones.
That's why you feel so much worse coming out of a hospital–especially when you spend an extra half hour wandering about the halls looking for the right door.
Excellent points and I would agree wholeheartedly about the first bit about Doc. We get on famously together and or sessions are considered bullshit free – he takes no bullshit from me and I certainly take none from him [and he knows it].
The place I was in today though is not like your common or garden hospital. It is a surreal place which [as I said above] is a cross between an airport concourse and a shopping centre. You won't see a single stethoscope or white coat, and in fact you're lucky to see anyone as the place always seems to be semi-deserted. I found this nice little illustration of the place which incidentally is only a section of a much [much] bigger complex. If you look at the first photo, second row you'll see the door I was looking for – it's about three quarters way down that vast cavern of glass on the right!