Dante’s Infernal Circles
Reflections on the many annoyances of modern life
By Lesley Hilts
A couple of months ago I found myself sitting in the ICU waiting room for maybe the fifth or sixth day. I don’t know. ICU time is not fixed in any familiar time continuum that you or I are used to, so it could have been one day, it could have been a week, it could have only been hours. Whatever the time frame, it felt like an eternity and it had me thinking of hell and purgatory and long waits for the women’s bathroom after way too many beers. This, in turn, got me to thinking about Dante Alighieri’s little poem, specifically his “Divine Comedy,” where he graphically illustrates the circles of hell. Light summer reading it is not. So I began to ponder. What if Dante wasn’t really talking about hell? Heck, what if his circles were simply metaphors for hellish places here on earth. ICU waiting rooms perhaps? In the spirit of the Lenten season, I compiled my personal circles of hell. Maybe you are familiar with some of these, maybe you are not.
Dante Alighieri photo by Vitt Pess
ICU WAITING ROOMS
You meet far too many strange people in the ICU, and, because you are usually crammed into a little room with not enough chairs and really bad lighting, you learn far more about some of these people than you ever wanted or needed to. It is not a happy place. You either get out of the ICU or you die, and both grief and joy are whirling around your head at any given moment.
People are cranky from lack of sleep, from fear, from way too much bad coffee (made from syrup, not grounds) and from trying to sleep on lumpy sofas and stiff chairs in a place where no one ever seems to actually sleep. Nobody gives you a straight answer about anything, and if you are lucky you actually get to talk to the doctor in charge (as opposed to watching his or her white coat swish out the door for the 100th time).
JUNIOR HIGH BATHROOMS
My father was convinced that this is where I would learn to smoke, and had I been so inclined, I probably could have proven him right. Certainly, any number of kids throughout the years got their first light in the confines of a junior high school bathroom. You could make a case that pretty much anywhere in the junior high environs constituted some version of purgatory, but the bathrooms were their own special brand of hell. Usually the last on the list for remodeling, these cramped, cold little cells consisted of broken doors, broken sinks and a lot of heartless, broken souls who derived pleasure out of torturing those of us too small, too funny looking, too bright, or too whatever. My most cherished junior high bathroom memory involves being dressed down in front of everyone by some girl I barely knew who was upset that I could not HIT a volleyball. My back pressed fearfully against a hard metal door, I pondered this SIN, and I wondered about the many other sins I may have unwittingly committed as a shy, insecure prepubescent girl.
HOSPITALS
Fortunately, I haven’t had to stay overnight (yet) in one of these posh little resorts, but I have spent enough time visiting and watching to get a feel for the place. Professional interrogators have nothing on hospital staff. The nurses and doctors all have shifts and very specific protocols for everything that they do; however, you will NEVER be privy to this information. They will admonish you for being too loud or for tiring out the patient, but they will think NOTHING of waking said patient up every hour for a pill, a shot, an enema, physical therapy, occupational therapy, respiratory therapy, another pill, food, a drink or some other procedure that must be done NOW at this EXACT MOMENT, no questions asked. Meals do not come at any particular time that I can tell. Dinner could be at four or it could be at six. Do not expect to get well or rested in the hospital. You could probably do this better on your own and at home.
AIRPLANES
Personally, I love to fly, but I don’t think any of us who have flown have escaped those flights from hell. These brutish journeys often involve tiny demons disguised as cherubic children (either yours or someone else’s), a drunk person (or two), and occasional flight mishaps (turbulence, an engine out, a flock of birds). While my flight over the
Himalayan mountains involved three straight hours of turbulence and an entire planeload of people throwing up into barf bags, it was nothing compared to my flight from Houston to Seattle with my brand-new baby boy on my lap. Between the screaming children (mine and four others), the twenty-something who pitched a fit about having to sit next to a baby, and the two medical emergencies, I just about threw myself off the plane. There have been others. The seat-kicking toddler whose parents ignored it. The drunk who hollered and sang through the entire flight. The shrieking baby who cried from takeoff to landing. The old lady who took my window seat and refused to move. The hungover trekker who had not bathed in days and reeked of alcohol. The people who insisted, INSISTED, that their enormous bag had every right to be planted at my feet. You get the idea.
URGENT CARE WAITING ROOMS
Bring me your poor, your unwashed, your snotty nosed, your mentally unstable. I just love urgent care! Coughing, phlegm-spewing children with grubby hands whose comatose parents let the little darlings loose in the waiting room. There might be signs about hand washing and covering your mouth, but these niceties are lost on this crowd. Do NOT expect to get out of the urgent care center in under two hours. That is just the time you will spend in the waiting room. When you finally get sent to the back to see the doctor, expect to wait in a small, cold, sterile little room for another hour or two. As an added bonus, be sure you are accompanied by a very sick, cranky toddler or baby. You could spend your whole day in the urgent care center and come out sicker than when you went in. Users beware.
THE UBIQUITOUS STAFF MEETING
I have come to the conclusion that the only people who view these meetings as important are the ones who are running them. Nothing, to me anyway, is more drool-inducing than sitting through a staff meeting about VERY IMPORTANT ITEMS that could have been dispensed with in a four-line email. I have no idea what it is about the illusion of power, but too many who wield it like to punish their captive audiences with bad jokes and useless admonitions about what SHOULD be happening in the workplace. My favorite meetings (ha!) are the ones in which the staff are roundly spanked for some minor infractions that they KNOW they are not committing, but they KNOW who is. The boss is too — (pick one) spineless, lazy, intimidated, randy — to actually have a one-on-one meeting with the actual perpetrators and instead prefers to noodle whip his staff with another brain-numbing meeting.
There are so many other circles I could expound upon — the doctor’s office, the car repair shop, the last mile of a grueling race, teaching gerunds to a classroom full of hormonal 14- and 15-year-olds, but time and space limitations defeat me. There may be a heaven and there may be a hell in the afterlife, but chances are that both of these places were inspired by happenings right here on earth.