I recently found an old memento from my early days in the hospital last year. Less than a week after massive spinal surgery, I was completely immobile, laying in bed and the nurse brought me my lunch tray. On it was this:
I was too weak to take a deep enough breath to laugh, yet I couldn’t help but smile, cringe and awkwardly chuckle to myself. “This? Am I really meant to drink THIS?” I know picking on hospital food is an easy target as no one expects it to be tasty, and to be totally fair, most of the actual food was not as bad as I expected. There were plenty of somewhat healthy options and they gave me a choice of what to eat instead of just arbitrarily shoving microwave hamburgers and canned peaches in my face. But this was surprising to me, especially given the circumstances.
….
Once I read the ingredient list, I couldn’t help but wonder….Aren’t I in a hospital, where I’m meant to get better? Shouldn’t I be avoiding a bunch of chemicals and synthetic additives? Isn’t it counterintuitive to ingest a bunch of processed artificialness when I’m in such a volatile state and my body only needs what’s essential and healthy? And that’s when I had an epiphanic moment and the reason why I asked my mom not to throw this carton away. I wanted to hang onto it because I knew this moment now would come and I could look back at the sardonic tragedy of this glimpse into our healthcare system.
It also seemed strangely comedic that I was being given no less than five different laxatives and medicines to help move things through my body (due to the fact that I was laying in bed for ten days) yet the food I was being served contained probably a quarter of the amount of daily fiber that a normal person would need. Why not ease up on the laxatives and feed me some extra broccoli or kale? Wouldn’t a fruit smoothie replace the need for all that medicine, not to mention that it would taste a lot better than this “fortified” strangeness?
I can laugh about this now because these days, I have the fortune of being able to eat a healthy diet of my choosing, but the reality of this paradox in our healthcare system still saddens me. We make all these gains, research and develop incredible technologies that improve the health of many, yet amidst this vast knowledge, hospitals are still serving synthetic chocolate milkshakes with “health” on the front, that look like they’re straight out of the 60’s?!
Arash Recovery 