Behind hospital doors.
(aired on All Things Considered November 23, 2004)

Hospitals and clinics are never exciting-looking. Architectural magazines don't lovingly photograph hospitals. And maybe economics play a role here, but I think even if a hospital had an infinite bank account for its buildings, it might look more warm or kind, but it would probably still look dull.

I spend most of my week in hospitals and clinics, and down every ordinary corridor and behind every plain door, there's something new and startling. Open this door and there's a man who almost killed himself and now sits on a bed; dull florescent light illuminating his life after near death. Behind another door, a surgeon's knife cuts into a sleeping person's belly. In another plain, quiet room, I'm listening to the heart of a newborn baby, small and wriggly, and he starts to cry. To quiet him, I put my pinkie finger in his mouth and he suckles, hard.

On another floor, I'm looking for someone and I check with her nurse, and he says, `Don't go in there right now. The family's here and the doctor's talking to them.' And two women walk out through the doorway of a room that holds a small crowd and they're crying, their hands covering their faces.

And upstairs later, in a gently lit room looking over the autumn leaves of the neighborhood, my teacher guides my hand on a baby's head as the baby emerges into the world, his mother shouting; the baby's slippery body writhing in my hands. Behind the sliding door of an ICU, a man lies unconscious, tubes coming out of his mouth, a ventilator bellow squeezing and opening, squeezing and opening, doing his breathing for him; no speaking, no crying, only a machine breathing.

Behind this plain, flat wooden door a man is talking about his bowel movements. Down a corridor and behind another plain door upstairs, another man tells about the voices inside his head. Open an identical door a hallway away and a woman is taking about the child she lost. And in another room, people are talking about sex. Around the corner, someone's gasping for air. And in the rooms of the hospitals, there are the insides of people's bodies; through speculums, on the screens of the MRI suite, in the open cavities of the operating room, the insides of dozens of people, of hundreds of people, of what seems like a whole city.

And so if a university or a museum might want to commission a daring architect to make it look like something very exciting is going on inside a building, a hospital must calm us all down. Because inside each boring-looking building, it's a chaotic carnival of human experience, a wild excess of pain and joy and suffering, all contained in buildings built rigorously dull; their bland designs announcing that this is all just the normal, everyday routine. Which - incredibly - it is.

copyright 2004 joe wright