Granta | G Olimpio
I remember opening presents and saying this was the best Christmas I’d had in years, and then finding myself in a curtained bay in the ER of a hospital in the town across the river…. Maybe it was because I didn’t want to think of myself as a sick person that I paid so much attention, maybe undue attention, to those other sick people around me, whose exchanges with caregivers I overheard – that is, eavesdropped on – for the thirty-six hours I spent there. I never saw most of them. But I had feelings about them, often quite violent ones. Some of what I felt toward my fellow sufferers in the ER was exacerbated by the conditions of the hospital: that hospital in particular, but also hospitals in general, at least in the US.