I didn’t see Mom or Dad for days, and I wondered why. An aid explained that visiting hours were twice a week for half an hour. Mom had been there to visit, but I was too sick to know it. Because the hospital’s function was to control contagious diseases, visitors were never allowed into a room with the patients. The hospital restricted visitors to a special glass corridor. Each room had glass walls separating it from adjacent rooms and the corridor connecting them. Parallel to the staff corridor was another corridor separated by glass. Visitors were restricted to the space behind the second glass wall. When I was able to see Mom it was through two walls of glass and across a space of twenty feet. We couldn’t talk to each other because the voice wouldn’t carry through all the glass. At first, it was a lot of waving and lip reading. Visits became frustrating because of the difficulty of communication. Visits also ended in what seemed like a second. When visiting hours ended, the security staff moved visitors out. The time machine went back to ultra slow where one second was a minute, one minute was an hour, and one hour seemed like a day. Now more than ever, I wanted to go home and play football.
Filed under: Biography, family, health care, Jun-e-or, Memories | Tagged: Burnside, Chicago, Mendel CHS, Polio |
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