Nine East [jay]

Nine East is blue. The desks are actually cabinets with counter tops wrapped in blue-gray Formica, some twisted, faux marble concept from Michelangelo’s nightmares. The tile is alternating light blue and dark blue, twelve inch squares of monotonous patchwork stretching on forever. Royal blue is the padding on the chairs as well as the curtains in the rooms. The carpet in parts of the hallways are azure mixed with tan (looks like azure mixed with puke to me), the paint on the walls and in the closets is alternately deep blue and pastel blue. The sheets, pillowcases and blankets are blue in varying shades depending on how many times they have been tortured in the industrial washers and dryers. I could never understand why they chose blue for the motif. They should know I am already blue.

Nine East is bright. There are lots of windows, which is great because the St Louis skyline is truly beautiful late at night. The lights of the city dance on the curvature of the Arch as Mighty Mississippi lazily plods south beneath it. There are walls of windows in some of the rooms dividing it completely in half. A couple of the floor to ceiling windows on one end of the wall are on tracks and act as a door from one side to the other. The eyes of the kids that live on Nine East are windows as well, windows into innocent and beautiful spirits that know they are here for a reason, just not quite sure what that reason really is.

Nine East is confusing. It is always under construction, so parts of it that were previously open the last time you were meandering through are suddenly closed off and your favorite thoroughfare for an escape to a time of sanity in the fresh air is now shut down with no explanation and certainly no map offered. The elevators are confusing. There are three sets of them: one for staff (off-limits to normal people), and two for normal people, but none of them go to the same places. If you get off the main elevators and turn left, you are headed to the room where your kid is, but if you take the secondary elevators and turn left, you end up in oncology. That is the last place you want to be – a place where little kids with no hair get more and more sick while their parents are begging God to make this suffering worth it in the long run by hanging everything on one word: remission. Talk about confusing…try telling your child they are losing their hair and throwing up ten times a day because the medicine that helps them hurts them too. Now that is confusing.

Nine East is happy. Everywhere you look, there are smiles. The staff is exceptional, especially in the CF wing of the floor. Most are young, bright, beautiful young ladies who are not fresh out of nursing school, but they are not cynical and hard either. Being a nurse on Nine East can take its toll. Oncology and CF kids spend a lot of time in Nine East, so it is almost like a strange second family. When a family on Nine East loses a son or daughter, so does the staff. The nurses wear these crazy clothes called “scrubs”. It is typical to see nurses in scrubs out and about in the real world, but the types of scrubs on Nine East are really strange. I guess in these days of internet access to all types of merchandise, nurses can customize their scrubs. A lot of the nurses would wear scrubs with SpongeBob, Barbie, Spiderman, Strawberry Shortcake and Superman, and all of the characters were smiling crazily, like they had just watched the Soup Nazi episode of Seinfeld. Some days the happiness of the scrubs and smiles of the staff made sense, like when the doctors told you your baby was going home. Other days those smiles were so demeaning, like watching your two year old stare at the smiles on the scrubs while she screams as they take her blood for the eighth time that day.

Nine East is terrifying. There is nothing worse than living on Nine East for three straight weeks. When you are there for that amount of time, you watch the turnover of patients. In three weeks, the kid on the other side of the glass changed four times. Two of the cases were child abuse, one was a one month old that contracted the common cold and it killed him when it got in his blood stream, and the last was a welfare mom who honestly did not know that she was starving her baby by only feeding her three times a day. It’s not the disease that your kid has that is so scary -- although it’s awful -- it is watching the pain of the world cycle through this blue world over and over. A completely different form of terrorism.

Nine East is hopeful. For people in those types of life situations, hope is the only thing you have on which to build any foundation. It is the common denominator among every person on Nine East. Nurses, parents, visitors, chaplains, doctors, patients, friends, social workers, therapists, siblings – everyone is holding on to one thing: our child could get better. It makes no difference if you are atheist or Christian, Buddhist or Muslim, the desperation of the situation does away with the pathetic labels we wear. The thing about losing the label is that when it is stripped away, we are left naked. A bunch of raw, emotionally and spiritually naked people left grasping at the answer to a very simple question: where is hope?

Nine East is an ark in a flood of brokenness. It is a blue, happy, terrifying, bright, confusing, hopeful oasis that you never hope to reach. But when you do, you find that everything and everyone is not quite what or whom you thought. It is a double-take of reality and a revelation of hurt that is deeper than pain and life that is higher than hope.

Nine East is a place I never want to be again, but that I embrace when I am.