Torture Chairs!

This week I'm taking a project management course. So, today I sat for eight hours in a dimly lit conference room, in an uncomfortable chair with the temperature at sub-zero! We got into statistics a bit during the chapter on cost and schedule. It was an interesting course, but it required a lot of concentration under extreme circumstances. Now I'm bushed!!

The chairs in class today reminded me of the ones I sat in at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Mom will probably laugh when reading this blog because I've joked about them a lot over the years. I fondly (?) refer to them as "torture chairs." We all spent many, many hours in those torture chairs at Hopkins!

I'm sure I could be successful designing and selling medical furniture and "accoutrements." I've gained first-hand experience in hospital waiting rooms, emergency rooms, patient rooms, etc. 18 years of it! What they have today could not have been designed from an "experience" perspective. So I think manufacturers should be required to spend time hanging out in hospitals. It would put a new spin on their designs.

Hospital furniture should not only provide comfort to the patient but to their primary caregiver and family as well. Especially during those long transplant surgeries of up to 19 hours! We sat through three of them! Can you imagine? I can remember our boys Kyle, Danny and Randy sprauled out on the waiting room floors...trying to catch a few hours of sleep in between the surgeon's updates.

The long banks of chairs in the waiting rooms all have arm rests in between each seat. What's that about? There is simply no way you can stretch out and get comfortable for long periods of time in those crazy chairs. After putting in grueling hours waiting, even the dirty floor was a welcome comfort for our boys. Also, there were times after sitting for hours in Ken's hospital room that I would climb right into bed next to him because I was so tired and weary. After days, and days on end, I could no longer bear to tolerate those rigid little chairs!

And here's one I know Mom will remember, "How about the custodians rolling those huge trash bins down the hospital corridor about 3 AM? " Surely those roller wheels could be made of something that would spin quietly. Remember that Mom?

Also, why didn't I think to make tally marks on the emergency room walls? I know if I had, they would now be covered with an interesting pattern from the hundreds of visits we made there. Some things...well...still conjure up difficult aspects of those years and years of Ken's illness. And that's only from our perspective. I don't even wish to think about how it was for Kenny...