Setting Exercise 4

The Hospital

She walks down the hallway, her heeled shoes clicking on the linoleum flooring. She holds a chart in her hands; a bundle of papers all nicely wrapped into one organized life. Tabs of different hues stick out in every direction. Red for flow sheets, blue for lab reports, pink for radiation therapy, purple for medication history, yellow for personal information and contacts and so on. Her white coat billows around her as she walks with purpose, exposing her pink flowered blouse and navy work pants. Her hair bounces in coils of black, unwinding and rewinding with every step. The perfumed trail she leaves behind is just as light as her appearances.

The hallway ahead stretches on forever, it seems, white walls and grey floor closing around like a cylindrical tube getting ever smaller and smaller. Like a funnel, leading everyone who walks down it to be sucked in. She slows for a minute to allow two nurses by. They are pushing what was once a man in a wheelchair across the hall to take a shower, one of them toting his IV drip behind him. This is what this place reduces some people to; beings living merely off machinery, some unable to even speak long enough to plead that they be left alone to follow Life’s bidding.
The smell envelops her, and not even her perfume can fend it off. The smell of hastily made food, and a chemical clean. Unnatural, this is a smell most often associated with death. This sad and lonely smell that accompanies rooms upon rooms of lives. One after another, this one is occupied by an old woman sitting in her bed and staring blankly at the television. The reason it is on is no longer for entertainment, but to keep her from going insane with loneliness. The next room has an empty bed where just yesterday a man slumbered.

At the Nurse’s station, she asks where to be directed to find this person, as she shows the nurse at the desk the name on her chart. "Wait one moment please Doctor, I will check for you," she coos as she walks away. At the soft click of the door shutting, she turns around and looks up at the monitors on either side of the nurses’ station. Black screens with green mountain-like lines blipping across them, each with a label underneath. Arden Johnson, 64. Cancer patient, vitals stable. No matter how morbid or outlandish the thought, she was watching someone’s life. A person who had been reduced to nothing but a name on a screen, and that green, undulating line blipping across the screen.

"Room 354, right down the hall that way and on the left." She looks back down at the chart, and says "I’ve got some lab work for you also..." and sifts through a pile under the letter T. She pulls out a white, black and green sheet of paper reading Quest Diagnostics across the top, and says with a smile, "Good luck."

The doctor tuns away and walks down the hallway, reading the piece of paper. She stalls in front of the door, her hand on the cold, smooth, silver knob. She wonders how exactly she is to tell a man he is going to die. With a twist of her wrist, the door is opened and she walks in.