Sometimes when I drive home on the weekends I feel like I’m on a mission to save the world. Every Friday I rush from the classroom to my dorm and then out to my car hoping to be on the road before 3:00. It is the highlight of my week. That probably sounds funny, since I’m a nineteen-year-old college sophomore who should love being on campus and spending my weekends partying until the break of dawn. Instead every weekend I go home and spend time with my parents–just the three of us–in whatever hospital room my father happens to be in at the time.
Earlier this week, my mother calculated that dad has spent the majority of the last six months in hospital. This isn’t the first time my father has been hospitalized for months at a time but this is the scariest.
When I was ten, mom came home to find him unconscious on the ground in a bedroom. That time a bleed vessel in his nose burst and he was put into a medically induced coma for awhile. His room in that hospital is a favorite of mine. But he didn’t stay there for long because they gave him too much of whatever medicine they used to put him in a coma and that hospital couldn’t wake him up.
So off we went to Baltimore. He was in the ICU at Maryland for at least a month. Wires, drains, compression stockings, and blood bags all crowded into this small dark room. Beep. Beep. Beep. The only happy constant noise in that room and on that ward.
We waited for him to wake up, coming everyday hoping for a new result. Nothing changed. Doctors called. We cried. They lost hope. Beep. Beep. Beep. Kept going. The only sign of life, we’d seen from him in a month or so. And then one day, we went to see him after my Christmas concert. I was telling him all about it and just like in some hallmark movie when I called out, “Daddy!” His eyes fluttered open and he found me.
The room was filled with people and his eyes quickly shut again. But for everyday after that he grew stronger, stumping all of his doctors. Those doctors who believed that he was gone; that he was a dead man with a beating heart.
And now, almost ten years later he is in the hospital again. Two different hospitals in the last two months of hospitalization. Two surgeries in the same place. Hopefully two different outcomes.
This hospital is known for its ability to help and sure patients. It is number one in the country in so many fields but one, really. The bedside manner. They poke and prod and do as they please because the person is a body not a being. The patient is no longer human but just a specimen.
I am looking into life as a mission. Every weekend as I travel home to cheer my parents and help out my mother, I have a mission to accomplish that isn’t always clear. My project is always spinning and working, but for now I’m trying to figure out life and the hospital. If this makes little sense, it is because I am working as I write. My mind is jumping as Dillard’s seems to in some of her essays.
I say all of this to show that whilst Annie Dillard is interested in all aspects of nature and how it relates to religion. She uses her experiences to showcase her feelings and challenge what she believes needs to be challenged. Her use of her own experiences helps to push her argument and further it.
Timeless English 