4th of July Prep

This time last year I was preparing for surgery; visiting messageboards and making lists of what to expect and what I would need.  Meanwhile everyone around me were making plans for their 4th of July celebrations.  When the topic came up I often responded with a flippant remark about having my own plans of eating red-white-and-blue jello while in a morphine haze in a place where I would be waited on day and night.  The reality though was another day in a filthy room, with no jello, where no one came to assist me even when I pushed the emergency call button.  The morphine haze of course felt more like a case of bad food poisoning than anything enjoyable.
Not this year!  I've made plans to camp out with Mr. M and we plan to join in the drinking and dancing 'round the bonfire (while this may sound like dangerous crip behavior I am sure that we will be safer than in that nasty, filthy hospital).
Part of me though thinks we should make a detour and stop by the hospital.  There will be other people there, just like I was last year, that could really use a good laugh or a smile.  Maybe I should look for some flags or something over at the dollar store.  Any ideas?
Ever been treated like a psychopath for trying to do something nice?
I just got off the phone with the community relations/volunteer coordinator at The Hospital and it looks like I will not be welcome there.  When I told her my idea she asked, "Why would you want to do that?"  She actually was acting angry and suspicious like I was somehow up to no good.  I just don't understand.  This is what's wrong with the world.  You try to do something nice and people automatically assume that there is something wrong with you.

Comments

[Eliza]

Unbelievable. But, not. Nearly ten years ago (wow!), I spent a semester studying in London. When the semester ended and it was time to move out of our flat, we discovered just how many magazines five young women could collect in four months. It would have been easier to just throw them out, but I thought it would be nice to bring them to the local hospital, figuring they could use them in the ER waiting room or give them to patients or use them for craft activities in the peds unit or . . . something. I packed what must have been several dozen pounds of magazines into my suitcase and dragged them ten blocks to the hospital. When I went inside and asked where I should bring them, the Waiting Room Watcher (??) looked at me like I was nuts. "Why would you want to do that?" she asked, as if this were a completely foreign concept. Hey, maybe it was. Maybe wanting something to read while you sit in an ER for eight hours is a strictly American concept. I have no idea.

Finally she agreed, still hesitant. "Um, I guess if you really want to leave them here, you can go scatter them around the tables yourself," all like, are you just trying to make me get up from my desk, stupid American? So, I walked around the very large room (which was remarkably empty; maybe they really DIDN'T need them because they didn't ever have a wait? Or just didn't have patients?), carefully placing a few magazines on each little table at each row of seats. I finished and left--with only an eye roll in response to my thanks and goodbye--feeling like I'd done something wrong rather than something nice.

Whenever I'm in a doctor's waiting room that only offers Fly Fishing in Florida or Kountry Krafters or Happy Homemaker to entertain me as I wait for five hours, I think about the very awesome magazines I left in that hospital and hope that someone enjoyed them. But I've never been tempted to do that again.