These past two weeks I’ve been part of a particular encampment, that of family member at the hospital. I am here at the Orthodox Hospital with my elderly friend who has had two major surgeries in a week. 

Sickness and childbirth are family occasions here, requiring not just spouses but children, parents, siblings, and cousins to gather at the hospital to wait for results and attend to the patient once back in a regular room. 

The custom provides an important segment of the tourism economy. In days when I was staying at an apartment-hotel, it seemed that half of their business came from Iraqi families attending family members at the American hospital.

At night the hospital provides bed and bedding for those staying over in the patients’ rooms.  It’s not quite a pajama party but we do wear track suits and other loose clothing as we shuffle wild-haired and bleary-eyed to the nurses’ station to ask for their ministrations at 3 a.m.   There are call buttons but this is more polite.

Mostly our job is to comfort, entertain, and encourage the patient.  Here is a system that understands the psycho-social dimensions of healing.  One sees it in the affectionate way the nursing staff tends my elderly friend, calling her endearments, patting her hand, stroking her cheek, and adjusting her bedding.  Every day they bathe her, usually in the shower but sometimes by sponge bath.  It’s a far cry from the New York hospital where my aged mother-in-law for weeks slept in a chair by her 92-year old husband while he was in the hospital.  Or the strictly business approach of American nurses with their patients.  I think of another friend who has had a number of hospitalizations in Philadelphia over the past few years who rarely got bathed and only at the sink and never shampooed.  In a supposedly premier nursing facility she was recently left to lie on a urine soaked pad for seven hours. Our hospitals strip us of our humanity.

The nurses here were thrilled when they saw the German last name of my friend.  They made sure she got a nurse who spoke German.  In fact, my friend doesn’t speak German but speaks the same three languages the rest of them do – Arabic, English, and French.  Her German last name reflects a fascinating history of Irish Presbyterians converting German and Syrian Jews in the mid-19^th century.  Her great-grandfather was one such German and came to Damascus with the Irish mission, married and settled there.

The nurses have also been very curious about me, the American lady.  My friend’s family is mostly in North America, with only the son of a second cousin here in Lebanon.  He and I are taking care of her during the day and I stay the night.  I have told the nurses the truth about my relationship to the patient – we’re friends from church.  But my friend felt that my continued presence would never be believed as mere friendship or Christian duty and instead the nurses would consider it a cover story for a lesbian relationship. She told them I was a relative.  I hope when I am 94-years old I will think anyone cares what my sexuality is.

This weekend the hospital is also going to be my bunker.  Christian friends have advised me not to go out tomorrow as it is Hassan Nasrallah’s funeral.  They fear that overwrought Shi’a might rampage Sunni and Christian areas. There is also concern that Israel won’t be able to resist attacking this gathering of Hezbollah and its supporters.  They buzzed the city about a week ago. Two days ago we had another day of them spoofing the navigational systems here.  I was only in a taxi, not an airplane (Thank God!) but my driver was going way off course until I figured out what was happening.

My elderly friend complains of my snoring. (Moi???)  I have provided her with a wooden spoon so now she bangs the bedrails to wake me up from my barnyard noises.  This is how I swim to consciousness these days.