I do not enjoy hospitals. My first experience, when I was 5, was thoroughly painful, traumatic, and life-changing. I’ve written about it a number of times, most recently here, in a post I called “Operation” and published on October 12, 2010. The last stay (1985) was terrible and terrifying (mentioned in “My Medical Blessing” on January 5). In between I delivered two babies at Alta Bates, which should have created positive hospital memories, but it didn’t work that way. I was irritated by the environment each time and I got out as soon as they’d let me, happy to be home even if it that meant more work.

I wrote one sonnet about the hospital, after the 1985 near-death debacle. I started it over a decade after the events, tweaked it now and then for another 12 years, and saw it published in a very small poetry magazine called The Enigmatist (no website, out of Georgetown TX) two springs ago.

I still like the piece. Now that I’m self-publishing, it’s on the playlist.

The only time I ever died before,
I didn’t see a light or feel the breath
of messenger. I didn’t reach the shore
of Styx – I skirted then the realm of death.
Just far enough I went to feel inside
decomposition halfway to my heart.
My body warned me as my innards died,
with threads of pain that pulled my gut apart.

I told the doctor and I told the nurse,
but patient words are not like test results.
They spoke advice while daily I grew worse
and nearer death. Infection’s soft insults
at last were seen and taken with a knife,
but I recall the seep of death in life.