Making use of useless moments...

This past week. It was one of those well-planned, fine-tuned, sequence of days that ended up in a flat, chaotic chord. Meals were planned, lists were made - even lists for each list! Groceries purchased, laundry done, bulk of cleaning complete…all ready for a week of company, arriving Monday evening. The only things left on the lists were setting up rooms - you know, fresh sheets on the beds, candles burning (to cover any unwelcome scents), newly laundered towels hung in a clean guest bathroom…Instead of greeting my company, playing hostess-with-the-mostest, on Monday night, though - I was laying on a very uncomfortable hospital bed with an IV in my arm, admitted, and ready to roll to my "room." Although I did get out of the hospital while our company was still visiting, beach and pool trips were replaced by doctor's and diagnostic appointments.

Lovely, huh?

Company plans aside, it felt like the entire week was a series of useless moments - a waste of time and energy where I could get absolutely nothing productive accomplished. (Unless you count racking up medical bills, steady strides to hitting that out-of-pocket insurance max, and reading the first page of "War and Peace" at least 10 times as being productive? (By the way - "War and Peace"doesn't mix well with anti-nausea and pain medications, especially being the first page does have a decent amount of French mixed into the English!)

But…were they really useless moments? Every life experience, each new venue visited, all of the new faces gracing the characters around us…all of it can be used in writing. Although I would never attempt to include this past week in personal memoirs (the memories are too hazy and laced with emotion to be accurate), I can make use of the setting, the personalities, smells/sounds/tastes, the emotions - all of it, in any scene that a character might be hospital bound. I suppose I have entirely too many hospital memories, with all the above accompanying them. However, no two were ever alike. (Unless you count the three times in the hospital while having babies - those were fairly similar, only the players looked different as the years passed.)

I penned this today, before beginning a self-made writing assignment. I do this - write out what may only be useless words, strung together…but, occasionally, they end up gracing the pages of a story, as well. :)

           Blinking in and out of a hazy consciousness, she could hear the syncopated screeching of the monitors attached to her chest. The scratchy fabric of the hospital gown fell loosely around her frame, an open-back reminding her that modesty was not a commodity where she now lay. Nausea mixed with hunger as she reached towards her aching stomach.

            “Try to hold still,” an unseen voice instructed.

            She felt a pinch in her arm and the taste of stale saline entering the veins of her right arm. As warmth encompassed her body, she shut her eyes again, pretending to be anywhere but there. Hospitals were like prisons to her. Locked behind the key-card doors, strapped down by IV poles and heart monitors, incessant noise and lights bombarding the senses.

It says "Beauty", pulled through the white with charcoal, accompanied by a dead dragon-fly. I suppose it my "artistic" way of making use of what might be useless - a re-used canvas and bug that my daughter found outside on the ground.