This post is an observation – not directly art related – but indulge me if you will.
This year has given me plenty of opportunities to sit in hospital rooms, keeping company of those who are in need of medical care.
Two thoughts:
1. Hospitals are awful places. Even the best hospitals are loud, noisy, impersonal, uncomfortable. They can be nightmarish for people who are confused. I can’t imagine how anyone rests or recovers in those places.
2. Patients, especially older ones, don’t understand the call button.
From my bedside chair or hallway perch, I’ve watched patients all day and night long get out of bed for any number of reasons: to go to the bathroom, stretch their legs, look for a family member or nurse, or simply to get their bearings and figure out where they are.
Every last one of them was a fall risk. And not one pressed the nurse call button.
If a nurse happened to notice, they’d come scurrying in and scold the patient, “You can’t get out of bed alone! You have to press the call button!” The patient would apologize sheepishly and promise not to do it again. But they would. Time and again. Many of them, up and down the hallways.
Now don’t get me wrong, call buttons rang all day long. But it seemed to be either younger or healthier patients who used them. Patients above “a certain” age – or those who were deeply ill – rarely used them. Nurses and aides used the call button to call other nurses, but patients: not so much.
Frankly, the “buttons” don’t look like buttons: they are a spot on the side of the bed that glows dimly. They’re square not button shaped. They’re often placed above the patient’s head, out of sight and out of reach. Or they’re on one of those hand-held controllers that get lost in the blankets or slip off the bed They have a stylized design that’s supposed to represent a nurse in a cap – though nurses don’t wear caps anymore – or perhaps a red cross. Regardless, they don’t make sense to the patients I know.
All of that has me thinking about buttons: real ones and figurative ones. About pushing buttons. Being buttoned up, or buttoned down. Using buttons to hold things together.
What do buttons make you think of? Do you have a button story or memory?