Salutations

I'm at the Veterans' Affairs hospital in Long Beach now. Things have a different feel than at the UCI Med Center. The elevators fly up and down compared to the UCI ones, and the big tower building housing the main hospital wards is nice and pretty and new. The rest of the buildings are a bit run down, as I thought the whole place would be. The people work slower, but they seem happier. Everyone seems to smile and wish each other good morning. Today, a nice old man saluted me. "Good morning, ma'am!" he said. I wasn't quite sure what to do, so I smiled and nodded and wished him a good morning back. It kind of felt like being offered crackers and grape juice in church, where I would sort of go along with some of it to be polite but not all of it because I didn't really belong to the group.

The banter in the multi-patient rooms is different, too. Actually, the fact that there is banter is different to begin with. More than the UCI patients, these patients seem at ease with sharing their room with three others and it doesn't faze them at all. So far I have yet to see a single female patient, and the banter reflects this pretty well. As we were finishing up rounding on one patient this morning, he said, "Thank you, guys." The patient in the next bed corrected him, "...and girls." The first one mumbled, "Yes, and girls," and the neighbor grinned, "See, I notice girls!" To which the first one grumbled, "I get in trouble if I notice girls."

Overall, it's not a bad place to be. It doesn't hurt that the seven-mile commute is on PCH right along the ocean and it's really pretty both going and coming from the hospital!