My Grandpa has just had a heart attack. This is the first time that I can recall in my thriving cystic fibrosis ridden life that the role of being a patient and being a visitor is reversed. As I am gathering with my family encompassing my grandpa’s hospital bed I feel a sudden onset of a unwelcomed novel feeling. The room is filled with nurses turning off the beeping monitors, but they are not mine. Doctors cluster around the patient who is not me. IV’s are having blood drawn out from them, but it’s not my blood. How could I not know what to do? What to say? How can I control my feelings when I just want to vomit, cry and shout how it’s not fair that my Pop, as we call him, has to go through this. I have grown up in hospitals and I now I find myself unable to figure out how to act in one? How can this be?

I have always been the patient. I look around and realize my family are a group of the strongest people out there. They are all too familiar with how to act, what to do and what to say from experiencing the hospital by my bedside. Trying to find my niche within the situation I draw back and have to go for a walk to take in the glass case of emotions I have just formed around myself.

This is when I mentally thank every single person who has come and visited me, past, present and future. I know its hard to come to the hospital, interrupt your life, walk on eggshells with your words because the wrong thing might strike the wrong chord and I will freak out at you. I know and am so grateful for every single second of your time. But, as I sit here with CF while my Grandpa suffers from a heart attack, I am aware of how much I don’t know and haven’t seen between these hospital walls. When each of my visitors leave my hospital room, I sit in there, surrounded by sterile hospital energy, recumbent in bed and floating in a haze of my own imagination. Visitors, you have to leave someone you love there and in this moment I realize how hard that can be. Seeing the look on my Grandpa’s face when I am there, when family is there, there is no comparable feeling of love, care and hope. If I could do anything in the world, it would be to put him in a wheelchair and whisk him away through Central Park, go on a submarine and find an island in Norway that is impervious to disease and sickness and eats egg salad on white bread for lunch (his favorite, of course!).

My niche is to be there, and when I’m there, be entirely present. For those two hours you spend with me when I am sick in the hospital, although, on rare occasions I project some anger and resentment, its only a facade to cover up true emotions and fear of a situation. The reality is I am truly grateful for your presence. The time you share visiting me on my numerous hospital trips makes time feel real again. It makes the outside non-hospital world seem whole except for the fact that you miss me and I humbly and honestly need that to help me heal. Right now, my Pop needs that.

When I am in the hospital as a patient, I daydream of my drive away from the hospital. I daydream of what music I will blare, what freedom will feel like, what normal time passing will feel like. When I am in the hospital as loving support while my Pop is surrounded by those 4 insipid white walls, I daydream of what his car ride home will feel like every single time I leave that place after a day visit. I wish he was next to me. Soon I know he will be!

PS. For those wondering, his car ride home has some Charlie Parker playing, we are in a Bonnie and Clyde get away car and the background is painted by Monet. And my car ride home looks something like Sweet Jane by The Velvet Underground playing in Thelma and Louises car when they are driving off the cliff with the background painted that of a Salvador Dali painting.