Ailing To Byzantium

Male patients gain a great deal of gravitas in hospital. In their cotton johnny gowns, with their ascetic pallors and beatific beard growths, they resemble a council of early Byzantine bishops, temporarily at a loose end while awaiting the latest news from Nicaea.
Obviously, this saintly countenance could simply be a symptom of too much time spent indoors watching the History Channel; or perhaps sixty milligrams of pure gravitas are always included in the array of intravenous drips hanging over the patient's bed; or maybe it's just that the patient's cheeks hollow and lose color because his martyr's diet of shapeless, unappetizing gray hospital sludge makes Jack Sprat's fabled fat-free dinner look like a dazzling smorgasbord of nature's most succulent bounty.
Alas, the physical trappings of holiness do not confer upon patients the ability to perform the miracles of holy men - if they did, the patients could easily conjure away their own diseases with a single incantation: "Take up thy bed and walk," they would announce solemnly to themselves (except, of course, the bed would belong to the hospital and far to heavy and cumbersome to carry).
And so these patient's must languish on those beds, surrounded by floral offering from well-wishers and work colleagues, waiting for test results and consequent medications; and I imagine this is pretty much how the aforementioned Byzantine bishops spent their days; although they waited for complex doctrinal ratifications rather than test results, and for the approved bottles of communion wine instead of medications by the dose. They hid behind the sword of Constantine like we patients hide behind the staff of Aesculapius, neither group really knowing for sure what is going on behind the scenes.

Comments

[Giric]

Why my dear fellow this is the reason that Physicians go into, "Practice." They, "practice," their entire lives on us never coming to a full understanding of anything. I for one believe that medicine in general has not come much further than the witch doctors of old. The only way to cure anything is by pill or scalpel. Now I realize in your case the scalpel has been of help, but watch out they don't pill you into the cemetery. I have suffered more grief at the hands of the medical profession than I care to talk about. But if an incantation of get well, get well, get well, will work for you, I pray God hears and makes it so.
As to flowers, no sick person should have to endure them. They give me asthma and I can't stand the process of watching them wilt and die only to turn their water into putrefied murk. Besides the florists lately seem to be obsessed with a lily called, "Stargazer." This thing is brilliant pink and white. It should never be brought indoors, it stinks to high heaven like an old woman's perfume, one whiff and I am suffocating. Our dearly departed Dads, sister, is forever sending them to my mother in-law in her care center, always just in time for me to visit. I get to sit in the car while my husband visits. Flowers were meant for gardens not for hospital rooms where no one has the sense to open a window.