And Absolutely NO AIR-BANDING

What: My Mom's Big Ol' Surgery Extravaganza
Where: University of Chicago Hospitals, Hyde Park, Chicago IL

Transportation: D+
The trip got off to an awfully rocky start, as I tried to move my roommate's boyfriend's car out from behind mine in the driveway only to find out that A) I can't drive a stick and B) Learning how to drive a stick is a longer-than-ten-minute investment. And the ongoing crackdown by Michigan State Patrol on anyone driving faster than 74 mph meant that the trip from A2 was quite a bit longer than I'd like. I didn't get to Chicago until almost 10 cst, which is insane. It was also long enough for the part of the Shamrock Shake I didn't finish to start melting into my car's carpeting.

Staff: B-
Despite the fact that I had to wake up at 4:30 am, on about 5 hrs sleep, to go with the entourage to the hospital and get mom checked in, the edge got taken off by the security guard on duty at the front desk. He was appropriately disarming and kind--the sort of person you kinda want to see when a family member's going in for major surgery--and also sounded and looked like Morgan Freeman. "You're Ann? You look too healthy to be here, go on home!" sounds trite in print, but is actually reassuring on some level in person. Unfortunately for Sorta-Morgan, his efforts got washed out by the woman in charge of the waiting room. She was a total battleaxe, and didn't seem to be able to keep track of the few people who, like myself, were pulling a 5 am - 4 pm shift in the waiting room.

Other highlights: the cute girl working the checkout line in the cafeteria, who offered to hold the line for me to return the chicken sandwich I accidentally picked up in favor of the cheeseburger I truly, deeply, madly wanted; the woman working the front desk of the LSD Ramada who got totally confused when I asked if there was any nearby place that I could find wifi internet.

Accomodations: C+
The U of C hospital is one of the best in the country, and (as far as I know) is the best in the Midwest behind the Mayo Clinic. However, you wouldn't know that from the way they run their actual facility. Wifi was around, but only accessible if you were a student or faculty member. Magazine selection was spotty and the chairs, while not uncomfortable, weren't the sort of quality that lends itself to long-term stakeouts. Given that the room was labelled "Surgery Family Waiting," you'd like to think that they would have taken that into account. Vending machines were accessible, but according to signage you couldn't eat or drink out of respect to patients who might be waiting for surgery. Totally, completely understandable, but in that case why the fuck are the machines there to begin with? Are we making up for the fact that the surgerees can't eat by taunting the healthy and then making them not eat too?

Teaching Hospitals: B
And on that note--the advantage of teaching hospitals is that they attract the best and brightest. The disadvantage is that you have a bunch of students wandering around and trying to answer pop quiz questions from the faculty. As a fake-scientist-in-training, I found myself on more than one occasion trying to figure out what the analog to some strangers joking about "You remember the one time that that guy had that terrible disease?" would be; I suppose it'd be sort of like talking about one entry in a militarized interstate dispute dataset. Sure, on the one hand you have a clinical interest in what determines escalation rates across issue areas, but on the other you're talking about real conflicts where real people died and real people are a bit upset about that fact. The intellectual understanding that you've done that sort of thing yourself doesn't deaden the impact of hearing medical students do it in a hospital setting, though.

Atmosphere: D+
My incredibly cursory knowledge of string theory leads me to believe that there's an alternative universe out there somewhere in which Mel Gibson was born in the US rather than adopting this, the birthplace of Jesus Christ, as his permament home as an adult. In such an alternate universe, Mad Max 2: Road Warrior was filmed in Hyde Park rather than the Australian Outback. It's a hellish, bombed-out moonscape to challenge the main drag in Detroit. I do have to give props to the good people at the Checkerboard Lounge though, who were good enough to sell me an 8 dollar Manhattan on a emptied-out Monday night to some smooth blues jams--and without carding me and risking the embarrassment of trying to figure out the Michigan speeding ticket and UMich card I would have offered as ID.

I also respect the high schoolers who were playing Magic at the Borders on the corner of 53rd and Lake Park. I thought that shit went out years ago.

Living Wills: F+
I understand the motivation. I don't understand the construct. They give the patient a couple of different options-- do you want to be kept on life support indefinitely, do you want to be kept on life support only so long as a recovery / other tactics are possible, and a write-in candidate. It's not clear, then, why you need somebody to be granted power of attorney in the event that the will needs to be executed. I suppose you could say that someone needs to be empowered to make the determination of what constitutes "reasonable measures" of treatment that justify extending life support, etc; but in that case, why am I, as a fake scientist (as dutifully referenced above) at all in a position of making that determination? Shouldn't someone with a medical degree be appointed, in the same way that they'd have a court-appointed defense attorney show up to represent a Farmington district gangbanger?