Flat Stanley

You've heard the expression that if you want to get any rest, the hospital is not the place to be? True. It seems that every hour or so, someone has to enter your room to get blood, or take your temp, or get your blood pressure, or give you meds, or give you a shot, or change your IV bag - it seriously goes on for 24 hours every day. I am not complaining about that - I NEEDED that, and that is why I was in the hospital.

I have to tell you one funny story that happened to me when I was in the hospital for eight days. One of those nights, or should I say early morning about 3am, I had a young man enter my room, thankfully keeping the lights low. I really hate it when the staff would throw the full overhead room lights on. Seriously? We are still trying to sleep during the night. He was clearly a lab tech of some sort as he carried the little plastic toolbox tote full of vials and labels. He set the box on the stand at the side of my bed and said, "Stanley?" 

I didn't say anything, but I was already wide awake and looking him right in the eye. He didn't make eye contact with me as he was fussing with his tourniquet and finding the right needle and getting a vial ready to take blood."Stanley?" he said again, "Born 05/22/1951?"

OK. I get it that people mistake me for a man sometimes because I am tall, wear jeans and t-shirts, very little jewelry on occasion, and usually very little make-up. I get it that we are in a hospital and we are all in uni-sex gowns. I have no earrings or make-up with me. My hair is nearly gone and what is there is mostly gray. Even though the lights are low, I still think out of the corner of his eye the lab tech was noticing that I was sleeping corner to corner on the hospital bed, because that is what tall people do, and therefore all tall people are men.

"Stanley!" he says one more time, louder, as if I am not hearing him and he needs to wake me up. I was just waiting for him to look at me. I desperately wanted him to look up and realize instantly, even in the low light, that I was a woman. I needed him to look at my chemo-riddled, cancer stricken face and NOT call me by a man's name again, let alone a man that is more than a decade older than me.

For one fleeting moment, I wished (inappropriately) that the hospital gown opened in the front, so that if he did finally look up and call me Stanley, I was going to flash him my breasts. Might as well use them while I still have them, right? And I was going to say, "I am NOT Flat Stanley!"

Luckily for me, he did look up as he was walking towards me to take blood and said, "I am so sorry - you're not Stanley." He sheepishly backed away, put his stuff in his kit, apologized again, and left the room.