Column:
Nothing to show but a lifetime of regrets
Published April 1, 2008
This was written during some downtime while working a job I had at a hospital last summer.
Having a full-time summer job is a very real indicator that I have at last cast off the shackles of childhood and finally exchanged them for the more crippling, dismal shackles of adulthood. Essentially what this means is that instead of running through a sprinkler in the lawn, splashing and giggling, I now peer pensively out the hospital window at those playful kids, hoping that they might hurt themselves, so they might be subjected to the hospital as I am. But it’s never the young ones who are admitted. No, I deal almost exclusively with patients who think Calvin Coolidge is still in office. This may be a result of the fact that my main duty is escorting patients who can’t walk to and from x-rays, but I think it’s safe to say that the majority of the patients have fond memories of the Cubs’ last World Series victory.
This being the case, I had to transport a patient to his CAT scan this morning. Immediately, as I retrieved him from his room and sat him down in a wheelchair, he complained about the positioning of the blanket draped over his body. This blanket became a fixture of conversation throughout the trip downstairs to Radiology, as the man constantly complained about how cold it was in the hospital hallways. I humored him and repeatedly agreed.
After the man’s CAT scan, I walked into the x-ray room to fetch him. Immediately he barked an order at me to take him back upstairs to his room, as if that wasn’t my single duty. Had he been 60 years younger and female, I might have been flattered by this yearning, forthright upstairs invitation, but that obviously not being the case, I was merely agitated. As I escorted the man back to his room, he asked me how long I had been working this job, and at first I took it as a roundabout way of telling me I was doing something wrong. He seemed genuinely interested though, so I told him this was just a summer job, that I was journalism major at the University of Missouri. His reaction was to wax nostalgic.
“I used to want to be a writer,” he said as we stepped into the elevator. I asked him what he did indeed do with his life, to which his response was semi-cryptic and wholly regretful.
“I made a bad choice,” he said. “I never did anything I enjoyed.”
Being awkward and socially inept as I am, I responded only with a profoundly inappropriate, “I dunno ...”
After bringing the man to his room, I explored an all-too-cliché line of thought, namely my own death. The way I see it, there are two ways you can go. You can die young, or you can die old. The cut off age for dying young is 27. If you live to 28, you have successfully outlived the likes of Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain. By age 28, you will never be a rock legend and you will never die young. This leaves only the latter form of demise, dying old. If I am going to die old, I thought, then I don’t want to end up like the patient I had just transported. His was a life of mistakes, complaints and blankets that didn’t fit the way he liked. If anything, I figured this little run-in was motivation enough to at least finish college. I’d hate to end up a bitter, downtrodden would-be writer who has nothing but cold hallways to show for a lifetime of regrets.