I was working overnight in Tiny Memorial Hospital, located in scenic rural America. My call room there was a converted patient room. As such, my bed was a hospital bed. Lying there one night, I rolled to the side and raised the head of the bed using the button on the rail. The blanket was standard hospital fare: stiff and thin. And the television remote, fully two pounds and connected to the television by cable, was the latest NASA technology from about 1965. I contemplated my surroundings, and noticed the nurse call button on the remote. And I had a strange desire for Jello and my old cardigan, but I shook it off.
I began to imagine what it was like for the older patients in the facility. And what it would be like for me one day, when I might be hospitalized or placed in a nursing home. Admittedly, given my tendency to run my mouth and forget the contents of my carry-on, I’m probably more likely to be tasered to death in an airport in my late 80s, or 50s. But one wonders about the future.
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Edwin Leap is an emergency physician who blogs at edwinleap.com and is the author of The Practice Test. This article originally appeared in Emergency Medicine News.