A patient patient

According to the classic English translation of Dante Alighieri’s “Inferno,” the gate to hell has a sign that says, “All hope abandon ye who enter here.” Proof that a hospital is not hell is that hope is the one thing you keep, no matter how long you stay confined. You lose, however, just about everything else.

The first thing you lose when you are admitted into a hospital is your privacy, or more precisely, your dignity. Total strangers look at every square inch of your body (not just the outside but even the inside of your body), punch holes into you, watch you as you use the bedpan or the urinal, catch you crying and weeping and gnashing your teeth as they get blood from your veins and arteries. If clothes make the person, the hospital gown unmakes you.

The second thing you lose when you are lying helpless on a hospital bed is your sense of self-importance. The meetings that you thought could never be held without you, the social events that you thought would be completely dull without your being the life of the party, the projects that you thought would go down the drain without your brilliant inputs - all these go on, most likely even more successfully, without you. As Eliza Doolittle sings in “My Fair Lady,” “Art and music will thrive without you / Somehow Keats will survive without you.”

The third thing you lose when you allow doctors to do whatever they want is your sense of control over your own body. You are injected with all sorts of medicine whose names you can barely pronounce and will certainly never be able to spell. You are given hospital food that you would never order in a restaurant (although an exception, I have to admit, is St. Luke’s, where a chef actually asks you if you want anything special to cater to your gourmet taste). You are awakened by nurses in the dead of night to find out if you are really sleeping or are already sleeping the sleep of the dead.

The fourth thing you lose, unless you are a humor writer like Abdon M. Balde Jr., is your sense of humor. You no longer appreciate your friend trying to make you feel better by remarking that you are still alive (“O, buhay ka pa!”). You miss seeing the love behind such text messages as “You don’t belong in a hospital” or “Get well already because work is piling up.” You cannot stand the disciples of Patch Adams coming in and trying to make you laugh. You cannot even stand watching the television situation comedies you used to enjoy before you got sick.

The fifth thing you lose is your sense that you are the center of the world. The television set keeps showing you the number of people who died in earthquakes and tsunamis, the faces of returning OFWs who are now out of a job and sure to create social instability in the country, and the senseless political bickering that you know will occupy people’s attention for months to come. You learn to forgive the nurses who do not come immediately after you buzz them because a “code” has just been announced (the term “code” means that another patient is suffering cardiopulmonary arrest and needs the attention of everybody).

Of course, since life is always fair despite not looking fair, there are some things you gain to make up for the things you lose.

The first thing you gain is your prayerfulness. There are no atheists in hospitals, just as there are no atheists in foxholes. You remember prayers you memorized as a child and never actually took seriously. You start reading the Bible again (or the Qur’an, if you are Islamic). Suddenly, even the things you used to think reeked of superstition (such as an imported bottle of water from Lourdes in France) appear like they might actually work. If you are one of those privileged enough to die temporarily (like the boy who wrote the bestseller “Heaven is for Real”), you come face to face with angels, perhaps even with God.

The second thing you gain is your trust in people. You may have seen enough episodes of “House” to know that doctors are often wrong, but you put your complete trust in the real-life doctors trying their best to save your life. Despite the action movies you have seen where the villain always tries to kill the hospitalized hero by injecting poison into an IV tube, you do not suspect any of the nurses of malicious intent. Although the little learning you get from the Internet (which, of course, is a very dangerous thing when we are talking about medicine) seems to contradict what the doctors are saying, you trust that the doctors were not absent the day your disease was being taken up in medical school.

The most important thing you gain is your sense of mortality. You may have believed that you are the one and only human being who will prove that not all men or women are mortal, no matter how hard you overwork yourself. Now you know that you are not Superman or Superwoman. One day, as you learned last Ash Wednesday, unto dust shalt thou return.