Sunday, January 25, 2009

What would Target do?


I visited Luciana in the hospital last night. The medical center bustles with busy people during the day, but at 7 pm on a Saturday night you can rattle and shuffle all by yourself down the long hallways.
The only person I saw asked me, "Is this the third floor?" I held up two fingers for her to see, and she muttered in dismay, a sound I have made myself many times because it's not possible to get found in this place before you first get lost. A minute later I realized that she was right. It was the third floor, Once she figured I knew where I was and she didn't know where she was, that woman became lost. That's the way it goes in here.
I did find Luciana, by calling her on my cell phone and getting repeated redirections, finally closing in on "maternal and infant health." Part of the disorientation to the hospital environment is that everything is named from the perspective of the workers.
That's why I like shopping at Target. Everything is labelled from the shopper's perspective: cookies in this aisle, vacuum cleaners in that aisle, air freshener beyond the prilosec area, batteries every third endcap, help desk over here, and exits clearly marked with red signage. Shoppers are the people pushing bright red carts, Targeteers are the people in bright red shirts and tan pants.
In the hospital, you have to learn to look at things from a medical provider's perspective. She's not longer my wife, the mother of my children, a woman with high blood pressure induced by the demands of providing everything necessary to three two-pound gestating embryos. She's a patient who ... I can't actually twist my mind around into the perspective that comes up with "maternal and infant health." I guess the patient is not relevant here, in that the name has no direct orientation to a patient. The designation's primary target is "health," an abstraction for which I have no immediate reference (except that, like pornography, I generally know it when I feel it). Specifying health a bit more, we are dealing with maternal and infant health. I suppose they used to call it the maternity ward. Why can't they call it Mothers & Babies Ward? Or "Your Family Starts Here"?

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