WHY HOSPITALS ARE OPTIONAL

The reason why hospitals are optional is because do we really need to be doing all this? No, of course we don’t. Because how else would humanity have made it this far before we started doing all this? You know?

“Life really enters and exits this world,” said ----e after learning that her friend’s mom died a few hours ago. That’s pretty deep. Let’s use that as our first point.

1. Life enters and exits this world.

- This is the way things go. Life enters, and it exits. That’s how things go, that’s how it works. But in hospitals, you try to pervert both the entrance and the exit. You really try to make the entrance….. Like, forced. You force the entrance…. You force the entrance by doing things like (ironically) "exit procedures."

You force the entrance, and you make the exit unacceptable. In medicine, we’re not allowed to accept the exit. We don’t want the exit to happen. There is no ability of hospitals to aid in the exit processs (except maybe I guess in palliative care). We only allow exit for the absolute worst cases where there’s literally nothing we can do; that way, we’re able to say that we “did everything.” But like wait what if we’re not supposed to do everything? What if there’s some kind of merit in “letting nature run its course”?

2. Hospitals are places of infection and transmission of illness.

- Seriously, why the fuck are hospitals a thing? When we know how many things are hospital-acquired. There’s literally a label for hospital-acquired things: hospital-acquired. It’s like baked into the way we talk about certain infections and diseases. Like MRSA, that shit loves hospitals. These infections love hospitals. It’s their way of outsmarting us, or like…. supersmarting us. As in, they’re superimposing their intelligence on ours.

- The other thing is delirium. It’s so common in the hospital, and it happens almost exclusively in hospitals. It's one of the saddest things to see. Like the one time I broke down crying in my surgery rotation becuase I saw an old lady at six in the morning just like screaming that she wanted to be let out of there and for her catheter to be removed. It was true fucking pain and futility and sadness in her voice and her cries and look on her face. There was some fight in her until she very quickly realized (probably on a bodily level) that she was fighting a losing battle. That shit is sad.

- Oh, and in the adult ICU, they taught us this whole protocol of assessing whether someone was delirious. There was a whole fucking ungodly acronym for it. It’s so just, like, mechanized and algorithmic. It’s crazy. Like, something so dire and distressing as delirium is so routine that we have acronyms that remind us how to assess for it. Which takes us into our next point.

3. Hospitals are places where strong minds get wasted and turned to the two-dimensional world, over and over again, over the course of many generations.

- Like, I’m witnessing in real time how the class of doctors is getting reproduced, and it’s fucking terrible. It’s like the system is traumatized and it passes the trauma down.

- Example: how - was saying that -----n was flexing under the guise of giving advice to second-years. She was telling them how to get honors in everything, thus implying that she had gotten honors in everything, therefore flexing unnecessarily, and also reproducing this toxic culture of honors-as-gold-medal that you get if you’re a genius and excellent person, and honors-as-end-all-be-all, as in, you should be willing to do all that it takes to get it, including but not limited to sacrificing your whole wellbeing at times for the grade.

- We are forced to look at screens so much of the day. We push our screens around on carts called WOWs (workstation on wheels) which used to be called COWs (computer on wheels), but the name was changed, per myth, because someone thought that they were being called a cow when someone asked for their COW.

- Notice how baked into the culture this all is. It’s so fuckin baked, man, that like……. That like……. There are legends about the thing that don’t even speak to the actual thing itself The thing is a simulacum, and the simulacrum has become the object of worship. The simulacrum… computers simulating real communication… has become a place of worship. And yes, I really would say that they are places of worship. They are objects in the truest sense of the word: they are things that we look through, not look at. Like windows, but they have us looking into these dimensions that are just… straight lines. It’s all straight lines in two dimensions. We are three-dimensional beings with four-plus dimensional aspirations, and we’re forced to be in the 2D world all day every day. Come the fuck on now, my guy.

Okay, that’s it. Time for rounds. Nine AM. Here goes nothing and everything and something.