Easing the Life Of a Hospitalized Friend
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Easing the Life Of a Hospitalized Friend
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Hospitals are places everyone wants to avoid. Hospitals are for the sick and where many go right before they die. They are difficult for the patients and for the friends and loved ones who visit the patients.
A few years spent taking kids on and off to the pediatric floor and hustling around the Emergency Room made one simple truth very painfully apparent. That fear of hospitals isn’t by any means reserved for patients. Friends, family, clergy and any number of people are uncomfortable, if not downright terrified, when they have to go into the hospital. The question is, when you’ve got a friend in the hospital that really, really doesn’t want to be there, what can you do to make things just a little bit easier?
1) Visit and visit often. The grimmest thing about a hospital stay is the outright loneliness of it all. My daughter was in the hospital with pneumonia for a week when she was three. I stayed in the room with her the entire week and the only visitors to the room were nurses, doctors and volunteers for a pet-therapy program in which my kid was too young and to sick to participate. She was also too sick to go play with the other kids in the playroom. We were stuck. Company would have been a breath of fresh air.
2) Send something to do. Right after loneliness, comes boredom. Or maybe before. The point is, when you’re lonely and bored in the hospital the best gift you can get is something to help alleviate the boredom. Books, puzzle books, movies (if there’s a DVD player in the room), small, handheld video games (especially for kids) and art sets and crafts are perfect for whiling away your time when you’re stuck inside those same four walls for days or weeks on end.
3) Bring snacks and real food if his diet allows. If you have ever eaten a meal in a hospital either as a patient or a visitor, you know what that is like. Hospital food is bland, bland, and bland. Everything tastes like cream of wheat without brown sugar or raisins, unflavored jell-o, etc. There can be no snacks because the patient’s caregivers feel the need to monitor his food intake. Anyone showing up with tasty snacks, even if illicit, will be welcomed with open arms.
4) Listen. I’m sure you are not looking forward to hearing about your hospitalized friend’s mournful recitations of the evils that are being done to him by his doctors and nurses. You would rather flee with one excuse or another than hear this same chant all over again. Don’t leave. Let them talk. They need to unburden their souls and it will help them feel better, and that is why you came to visit in the first place, yes?
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.
When you seriously think about it, the best thing that can be done for a friend and their family while hospitalized is to preserve some sense of normalcy. This gives them a semblance of real life, and when they finally get sprung from the hospital, they can get right back to their life along with their sanity.
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