Chapter 8 tourist

After World War II, the tuberculosis epidemic broke out, and the Belk Naval Hospital, which originally accommodated sick children, also began to accommodate young patients with tuberculosis.Today the hospital is primarily concerned with aging, the inevitable depletion of body and mind.Geriatrics is only part of the landscape if a picture is used to describe the entire range of medical care here.There is another scene in the picture: more than two dozen patients in a permanent coma.These poor souls sank into endless night, with one foot on the threshold of death.They never left their wards.But everyone knows that they are there. They seem to be a heavy burden, weighing on all the staff in the hospital, like the guilt that everyone carries in their hearts.On the other side, next to the poor and sick elderly area, there are several obese patients, and they often look panicked.Doctors are eager to help these people shed their monstrous pounds.In the middle area, there is a particularly impressive regiment, and the men with injured feet are the main force in it.Some of these patients who survived the greater disaster were sports injuries, some were injured in car accidents, family accidents...etc., all the accidental injuries you can imagine.They were sent to Belk to wait for time for their injured limbs to heal.I call these people "tourists".

In the end, to complete the picture, a corner had to be found for people like us, our winged birds, voiceless parrots, poor little birds who nest in a cul-de-sac in the Department of Neurology.Of course, people like us are an eyesore.I am well aware that when we pass in front of others, it will trigger a slight sense of powerlessness in the other person, causing stiffness and silence.We are a relatively unwelcome group of patients. The best place to observe all these landscapes is the rehabilitation center, where all kinds of rehabilitation patients are mixed.This is really like the quarter of the Holy Land in old Paris, full of sound and color.Amid the cacophony of braces, splints, prosthetics, and more or less complicated rehabilitation equipment, we see a young man wearing an earring, severely fractured while riding a motorcycle; An old grandmother who fell off a high stool not long ago and is now learning to walk; and a seemingly homeless person, until now no one knows how he broke a leg on the subway.Because there is no one to take care of it now, the group of people lined up like onions, dancing and shaking.And I was tied to a sloping board, which was pulled up little by little to become vertical.Every morning, I have to be suspended for half an hour in this respectful posture of standing at attention, as if the stone statue of the commander appeared in the last scene of Mozart's "Don Juan".People around me were laughing and shouting and shouting and joking with each other.I wish I could share in everyone's joy, but young men, toddler grandmothers, and homeless people all turn their faces away when I look at you through the one eye I have left. Starting to look at the ceiling, it seems urgent to check the fire detectors fixed there.These "tourists" are probably afraid of fire.