Flashback: A relief to go to hospital?

Originally posted 1 June, 2013

Twice in the last 2 days I saw the inside of a hospital. The first was for a sleep study, the second one of my far more common trips to emergency.

There was a few moments, like when dinner was brought to me the night of the sleep study, and (unsurprisingly) when I was getting my first hit of morphine for the night, when I had this odd sense of relief.

The morphine is fairly easily explained, except that I wasn’t relieved that my pain levels were about to drop. I was relieved in another way that my broken brain can’t really find the words for.

It was almost as though, in a night where trying to string together a coherent sentence was as frustrating as trying to find the other sock of the pair in a pile of about 5 loads of washing, I was relieved someone else was feeding me. That someone else could worry about whether the oven was off and the door was locked.

I don’t know what that means. I know I shouldn’t be happy to be in hospital – and I wasn’t happy to go, and I was happy to come home… but I was, on some level, happy to be there.