Indiana Jones, where are you?

Every day this week My Beloved and I have paid a visit to the hospital. Her father is recovering from surgery and a fall. It has been touch and go but when you're eighty-four and break a hip, things aren't always smooth sailing.

I have wandered the corridors of this particular venue many times in the past twenty years for various family members. It isn't the closest but it is where I would prefer to be taken should anything arise. The building is older and has been expanded over the decades but the staff has always been excellent to my family.

That all being said, I can barely find my way around the place. Does anyone else have this issue? And it just isn't this hospital. Nearly every home of healing I have ever visited is like a hedgerow maze. Corridors twist and turn often with long stretches of hallway with no doors only to pop out into a lobby where you have five choices to go. I always seem to pick the wrong course when that happens. No matter how well signed these places are I become dubious when I walk the hallways.

Perhaps it is the medical field in general that has this issue. There are some doctor's offices I have been to that are just as confusing. Left, left, right and right again. It shouldn't take a map and a flashlight along with a GPS to get where you are going in an office no larger than my house. One of the tenets of architecture is to not only make a building functional and aesthetically pleasing but to make it practical to traverse. I suppose doctors and nurses get used to finding their way around but I'll bet the newbies get just as lost as the visitors. "I'm sorry nurse, I got lost on my way from radiology. What do you mean the patient died?"

Perhaps I will see if they have a map on-line the next time I visit. That and a compass could make the journey a little less confusing. And by the way, Pops is getting better. He's a tough old bird, like seven day old jerky.