From Bed Pans to Pine Trees

This is probably the most romantic story you have ever heard.

My parents met changing bed pans in a nursing home.

It was the seventies; most of my friends parents met at Woodstock or Southern California’s famous Venice Beach or one of those other places hippies loved in the seventies.

Not my parents. They both worked in a nursing home in a suburb of The city of Angels ( Los Angeles) in 1973. Six years later they rode on the back of my dad’s motorcycle to the Grand Canyon to camp and a year later they had me. Eventually our family would relocate from the Los Angeles suburbs to our home in the San Bernardino National Forest at over six thousand feet among the pine trees and the squirrels.

How does this come back to me?

I just tried to use my first bed pan today.

I told this story to my nurse, who looked at me like I was a weirdo.

Did I break some kind of hospital code? Are you not suppose to speak while a bed pan is being put under your ass?
Meanwhile, my redneck hospital room neighbor talked at me the entire time I attempted to use the bedpan.

Truth be told she hasn’t stopped taking to me for the whole twenty four hours I was in the hospital, even when I don’t answer.

Wouldn’t you think that there would be some kind of hospital etiquette where when you realize that your hospital roommate is using a bed pan ( or trying to) you stop talking at them for at least thirty seconds?

This has been my first hospital experience and it was honestly not as bad as I expected but none the less the whole time, I missed my bed, I missed my boyfriend, I even missed those stupid mutts we have and their crazy shenanigans! Being in the hospital just really makes you miss the comforts of home!