Life Off-Label

When first started working at my hospital, this weird sound over the intercom freaked me out. I didn’t know what it was, and at one point I thought I my mind was hallucinating voices. Then I realized it’s a slightly eerie, but sweet sound of a lady humming to the tune of “lullaby”, and one of my coworkers informed me that they play it every time a baby is delivered in the hospital. I’m used to hearing things like “code blue” over the intercom, but we didn’t have something to announce births like that at the last hospital I worked at. To be fair, that hospital delivers more babies than any other hospital in the country, so if they did something like that the song would pretty much be on a continuous loop.

The nice thing about the song though is that it made me stop and realize that, at that exact moment, it was perhaps the best day of someone’s life. I like to think about excited family members crowding the room, snapping pictures and fighting over who gets to hold the baby next. Pink or blue balloons are bobbing everywhere and the cliche gifts and cards are scattered all around. It makes me smile.

Of course, hospitals aren’t always a place of joy. I can’t always erase from my memory the families waiting outside a room in an ICU, watching someone take the last breaths of their life. Or those waiting outside an OR, wondering what kind of news someone in scrubs will come out to bring. The same day someone brings a beautiful human life in the world, another finds out a loved one is terminally ill. The best day of one person’s life is another person’s worst. That’s how it goes.

Working in a hospital and being around those things all the time can make you a little jaded to it though. Your normal everyday is consumed by these things happening around you all the time, and so often we forget to stop and think about how much it isn’t part of the normal everyday life of those who come through those doors as patients. I believe that compassion can go along way to help someone overcome something, and it starts with appreciating how crazy each and every day at a hospital can be.