21 Days
The truly terrible cacophony of smells and noises. You try finishing your dinner with someone across the curtain shitting the bed. Someone in the hallway on the phone, crying. "There's nothing else they can do for her." That was the third floor. On the seventh floor, a man with green socks gets to walk laps around the hall all day. There's the obese man. The young man. Nurse Joan with a beard and venom toward Hillary Clinton. Chatty nurses. The nurses who zone out to your TV for awhile without really saying a word. Packs of visitors who travel in a cloud of stale cigarette smells. An endless ricochet of beeping IVs. The neighbor needs help going to the bathroom for the fifteenth time since I've been there. Wants to tell the nurse a joke. There's a look of desperation on everyone's faces, and not just here. On the highways too. No one's seen the sun in months. Not really. It's just a hurried shuffl...