Nephritis confined me in the hospital during the summer break when I was
in the fourth grade living in Kyoto, Japan. Although I didn’t feel so
sick, the doctor ordered me to be inactive all the time. Inside a
six-bed pediatric ward and a hallway between the nurse station and the
hospital kitchen was the allowed portion for me to move around. When I
needed to go beyond it, a nurse put me in a wheelchair. Within a couple
of days, I thought I would be bored to death, not from nephritis. I
walked back and forth along my restricted stretch on the hallway many
times a day, which also bored me quickly. One of my daily routines was
to go take a tray meal of an unseasoned diet three times a day from the
hospital kitchen on the furthest end of the allowed stretch. Next to the
kitchen was a small recreation room that was carpeted and had a
television. Watching TV was banned for some reason, and I used the room
to blow bubbles. My mother brought me a bubble blower on one of her
visits and I played with it out of the ward window. One day, I found out
that bubbles remained for some time on the carpeted surface and that
fascinated me. I blew as many bubbles as I could on the carpet in the
recreation room and got me surrounded by glittering bubbles. I was
obsessed with it as the room looked like a dreamland or heaven. That
became my main pastime during my lockup and made the carpet so soggy and
drenched that nobody could sit on it anymore.
One night in those
hospital days, I woke up to the disturbing noise in the small hours.
Doctors and nurses were hastily coming in and going out of my ward. They
gathered around a girl whose bed was right across mine. She uttered in a
faint voice, “It hurts, it hurts.” repeatedly. The curtains had been
drawn around her bed and I had no idea what was going on, but at least I
sensed something bad was happening to the girl. Next morning, I found
her and her bed gone somewhere. I asked a nurse where she went, and she
told me that the girl moved to a two-bed ward on the same floor. I
understood that the number of beds in a ward corresponded with the
patient’s condition. The fewer the beds were, the worse the condition
was. A chart was made in my head. If a patient in a six-bed ward
recovered, the one would be released from the hospital. But if a patient
got worse, the one would be sent to a two-bed ward. And if a patient
moved to a private room, the one would be close to death.
Out of
boredom and curiosity, I decided to explore the further back of the
pediatric floor. I sneaked into the banned area beyond my allowed
stretch of the hallway. I turned the corner over the hospital kitchen
for the first time. There was also a long hallway with wards on both
sides, but it was a lot different from the one in front of my ward.
Probably because it was far from the nurse station or the kitchen, this
hallway was oddly quiet. It was completely empty with nobody walking and
as still as a picture. Tense air filled the stretch like down the
hallway in that hotel in ‘The Shining’. A room number and the name of
the occupant were put up beside each ward door. I slowly walked along
the two-bed wards and further down to the section with the private
rooms. Although I was just walking down the hallway, a strange fear had
gradually grown inside me that I was walking toward death, closer and
closer. Then, a name tag on one private room caught my eyes and I froze
on the spot. It was my name written on it. I gasped with surprise,
confusion, and horror. I couldn’t grasp what it was. Had my private room
been already prepared secretly? Was I being moved here soon? Had my
condition turned so bad? I peered at the name tag with my heart thumping
hard, and noticed one of the Chinese characters used for the name was
different from mine while the pronunciation was the same. The patient
had the same name as mine with one different Chinese character. Instead
of relief though, I felt I saw what I shouldn’t have seen. I turned back
hurriedly, almost running, feeling dreadfully scared of being chased by
death. Back on my bed in my ward, I tried to figure out what it meant.
Could it be a sign that my condition would worsen and I would die? Could
it be a punishment for my exploration of the banned area? Could it be a
warning that I would end up there unless I stayed inactive? Or would
the person with the same name die in place of me? For a child, it was an
uncomprehending, frightening, shocking experience.
A few weeks
later, at the end of the summer break, the doctor decided my release
from the hospital, possibly because of my shift to a more obedient,
inactive patient. On the day of release, my mother brought me a pink
summer dress into which I finally got rid of pajamas. The nurses told me
about a hospital’s custom. A patient should visit a shrine on the
rooftop of the hospital to thank for the release. I didn’t know there
was a shrine in the hospital and felt strange. It didn’t make sense to
me. At the center of medical science like a hospital, a place to count
on unseen power existed. I wondered if the hospital conceded that
everything here depended on God in the end. The hospital was big with
many tall buildings, one of which had a shrine on the rooftop. It was
far from my ward but now I walked throughout not in a wheelchair.
Opening the door to the roof top, I went outside. The sunshine, the sky,
the breeze, all of those things outside looked new to me. Numerous
washed bandages that were hung from the rods to be dried outside were
swayed by the gentle breeze like some sort of festive decorations. I
plowed through the long pieces of white bandages and the small orange
gateway to the shrine appeared on the back. From up there, I saw the
building in which my ward was across the courtyard. I counted the floors
and windows and spotted my ward. My ward mate’s mother was sitting by
the window as usual. She had been staying at the hospital with her
daughter because she was little and the hospital was too far from her
home to visit, which made my hospital days as if living with her as
well. I waved at her for a long time until she noticed me. Finally she
waved me back. We waved at each other frantically for a while. Then I
put my hands together to pray at the small shrine that was visited only
by those who survived, thinking that it was God who decided life and
death after all and what the hospital could do was limited compared to
that.
That long summer in my childhood is unforgettable to me. And I can tell, it must have a great influence on my life thereafter.
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