Everything’s gone silent
as though a group of doctors has entered
the children’s ward.
Drone of water vehicles stowed,
a couple strolls the long edge of conversation.
Waves, like fear, have subsided—
only their small breaths remain.
I wake up in a hospital isolation room, where everything smells weird. It’s 1967 in Galway City, Ireland, and I’m four years old.
The worst smell is the antiseptic—a word I don’t know yet. The second smell is the crayons and newssheet coloring books on the nightstand. Christmas is gone, so how can these be for me?
The family lore would say that I spent nearly seven weeks in that hospital. That’s forty-nine days or 1,176 hours’ worth of temperature checks, dosages, white-coated doctors.
When my son Locklin was a month old, he became very sick. He started throwing up and kept throwing up and ended up in the hospital.
The hospital ID band on my son’s wrist fit on my ring finger. I could cradle my son’s whole body in my hands.
The oxygen meter clamped to his finger was the size of a paper clip. It glowed red and blue, the colors of emergency, like tiny police lights flashing against bleached hospital sheets.
When was the last time I combed my hair?
Before the ambulance, even longer
when the plate shattered
and he cleaned it up without speaking.
Dianne Silvestri ~
The corridors seethe with nocturnal predators,
their voices low.
My door latch coughs, a figure hisses,
I’ve come to draw blood,
wrenches my arm like a lamb shank,
rasps it with alcohol, plunges her spike,
pops one after another color-coded
rubber-stoppered vial into the sheath,
unplugs each loaded one to add
to the crimson log pile weighting my thigh,
Dan Yashinsky ~
In Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, if a blizzard keeps you in your neighbor’s house, they say you’ve been “storm-stayed.” I first learned this term from a storyteller in the Maritimes, and it’s come to hold special meaning for me and those I work with.
I am the storyteller-in-residence at a research and teaching hospital for the elderly, in Toronto. My work here, known as “storycare,” reflects the institution’s philosophy that literature and storytelling are essential to health care.
Every week, I work with clinicians and therapists to bring storycare to patients in the palliative-care, rehab and long-term-care units. Twice weekly, I head to the fourth floor to co-lead storytelling circles for the geriatric psychiatry patients.
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