After reporting chest pain to my doctor, he ordered an X-ray. Thirty minutes after biking home from imaging and starting my work day, I received repeated phone calls. On the fifth, I picked up. I was told that I had a collapsed lung and that I needed to go immediately to the ER. For the next two weeks, I was largely bedridden as my lung re-collapsed after each operation and surgery.

At first, I reflected on how the hospital seemed to turn the world on its head. Outside, virtually everyone you meet is healthy, but all the patients inside were sick or dying. Ultimately, this inversion wasn't how I came to understand the hospital. Instead, I saw it as a place that magnifies what can go unseen in daily life. It holds the truths of the human condition to your face so they can't be ignored. Life and death, love and anger, joy and pain. I observed all this in the hospital and wrote the following notes.

8/2. When my roommate learns more about his disease, I hear too. First, we're told he'll be discharged within a day. But his weakness worsens and they find a massive tumor in his spinal cord. He'll have neurosurgery and twenty days of radiation. I can't share aloud my distress about his condition because we share a room. When my partner visits, I write on my laptop for her to see, "The man across from me is dying," and I cry as she holds me.

8/5. I'm back in my hospital room after lung surgery. Weak, drugged, and attached to the wall by many tubes and wires, I lie still in bed. I inexplicably demand my partner to read aloud David Foster Wallace's exposition of descriptivist and prescriptivist grammars. She obliges, but DFW's diction would give anyone trouble. "Blame it on Heisbergian uncertainty," she reads. Even with a throat raw from intubation, I can't resist my pedantic tendencies and I offer softly, "Try that again." This repeats another time before she reads, "Heis-en-bergian uncertainty," and I smile.

8/7. Most of the time, Tylenol, oxycodone, and epidural fentanyl manage my pain. One night, I wake up and it feels like someone is trying to blowtorch through my chest wall. I want to press my call button, but the pain keeps me from moving. By some act of god, my nurse comes to check on me. My face is wet with tears and I say quietly, "I am in so much pain."

8/9. "Is this going to hurt?" I ask Nurse Adriane as she prepares to remove the catheter between my legs. After days of her steadfast care and cheerful banter, I've come to trust her completely. "Less than it did going in," she responds. She pulls, and my head kicks back in a manner appropriate for such an exorcism.

8/12. I get a new roommate who snores more loudly than anyone I've known. At night, I'm unable to sleep and I mutter quiet obscenities as my rage boils over. That morning, I'm overcome with joy when my doctors tell me that after some twists and turns my discharge is imminent. "Sounds like good news?" my roommate asks and adds, "I'm very glad to hear that."

8/13. Before I'm discharged, the surgeon has to remove the tube that runs into my chest cavity. He tells me to take three deep breaths, and on the third, he pulls on the tube as hard as he can. Later, my partner is sitting on my hospital bed and I ask her, "Want to see something gross?" She shakes her head no, but I point to where the wall and curtain are lined with uneven splotches of blood. She glares, we laugh, and then leave the hospital behind.

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