Making It a Little Easier When a Friend is in the Hospital

Hospitals are dismal places to spend even a small of time, let alone an extended stay of days or weeks. Even visitors to hospitals get the feeling of doom and gloom the same as if they were visiting a morgue.

Any visitor to the hospital will inform you that this dread is not reserved for the patients alone. Friends, family clergy and anyone else are uncomfortable in hospital surroundings as well. Hospitals are where sick people go and the hustle and bustle of the hospital staff while treating and transporting the sick and injured speedily down the halls in noisy gurneys does not have the happy ambience of a theme park. But, you know you must visit your sick friend who would gladly trade his hospital room for a jail cell if he could. You need to bring the poor soul some cheer, but how?

1) Visit often, hard as that is on you. The worst thing about a hospital stay is the feeling of isolation. When my son was two years old, he was forced to spend a week in the pediatrics ward with a respiratory infection. I stayed in his room with him the entire week and the only people other than me that came into the room were nurses, doctors and an occasional volunteer in charge of the pets-for-therapy program. My son was too ill to go play with the other kids in the playroom. The loneliness got to us both. The two of us would have welcomed the company of friends and family.

2) Bring the patient something to do. Right up there with loneliness is boredom. Lonely, bored people need something to do to cheer them up no matter how sick they are. Bring in puzzles, books, art projects, craft projects, movies (if there is a DVD player available) or hand held game consoles. A patient needs something to relieve his boring existence all alone staring at green hospital walls day and night.

3) Come bearing gifts of food. Hospital food has a very bad reputation and worse, its reputation is deserved. Hospital food might as well be Gerber's baby food for infants, not even toddlers. Snacks are not brought to patients by their caregivers as these good people are supposed to closely monitor their patient's food intake. Well, fine, but no patient is going to survive on pureed peas, so bring something really tasty. No matter what the health squad says, your friend will be better for it and you will be his hero.

4) Listen. No, nobody wants to hear about how dehumanizing treatment in the hospital can be. You feel like a pincushion by the time you're done. You really want to go home. It starts feeling like a mantra after a while. But let them talk. They need to, and it'll help you both feel better by the time they're done.

5) Talk to them. They surely want to hear about what is going on outside the realm of the hospital room. Tell them about current events both in the world and close to home. Reassure them that life is going on as normal outside the confines of the hospital.

The truth is the best thing you can do for your friend and his family while they are stuck in their hospital bed is to maintain a sense of normalcy. This will make them believe that there is some semblance of life in the real world once they break out of their current institutionalized mode. And once out, they will be better able to return to life with some vestige of sanity.

If you appreciated the preceding article, you may go and look at more related writing at Henri Degre or this Henri Degre Blog.