The hospital bed next to my father’s
TLDR: 70 people come daily to visit a 15 year old boy in a coma at the ICU
The visits at the ICU of Ain Shams Specialized Hospital have a rather prison like nature especially due to the structure of the place. ICU ward C is built as like a Soviet block, a square building surrounded by a square wall without a roof. So basically you have a closed square inside an open square. At 5pm every afternoon they open a metal gate and you can look at your loved ones through a grubby window in the narrow corridor between two squares. They can’t hear you and you can’t hear them.
Then you enter building at 6pm and get to meet with a young attending doctor who answers your questions with contempt. If the security guard can be bribed, they let you in to see your relative for a few seconds and whisk you out the moment you ask them any real questions.
Two beds away from my father is a young boy of 15. He got hit by a car while he was crossing the street and is in a coma.
The day I checked my father into the ICU, I saw in the courtyard of the ER about 40 men in traditional clothing sitting on the hospital lawn and about 40 or so women in the shade. I didn’t think much about it that day. It was a hectic day and a fight had broken out in the ER reception with another family trying to beat up the doctors so I avoided the other visitors.
The next day, as I discovered the inhumain visiting protocol, I saw the same group of 70 or so people. The mother of the boy told me that she recognized me from the day before “you are that pale girl who was shouting at people”. She told me that her son had been hit by a car and they had to run from hospital to hospital untill they could find one that would accept their son at a non extortionate or reasonably extortionate rate. Their entire village traveled from upper Egypt, elders, women and children just to look at the boy from the grubby window day after day.
The mother of the 15 year old boy is exactly my age, which amuses us both. She is very supportive and kind to me, offering smiles and holding my hand. They have very different customs and I realized that they take turns in the cramped corridor. The women look first and then the men. As they have to pass by me first to look at their boy it makes the men very uncomfortable and even if it isn’t my way of seeing things I try to respect them because I realize that not brushing past me in the corridor is their way of respecting me. The women have all befriended me and look at my father daily. The children ask to climb on my back in order to “see the uncle who is awake” given that my father is conscious.
The visiting protocol is really horrible when you have conscious relative as they look at you asking to come in and don’t understand why you can’t. I suppose having an unconscious relative is another level of anguish that I can’t fathom.
I’m grateful for having met this group of women. They make the ICU visitation process a lot more human.
