You remember when I said I felt like I was suffocating at school? Yesterday I went to the hospital, twice. It was 3 to the 7th power worse than that and I’ve come to hate hospitals even more than ever. Holy Spirit, at least. It has got to be the worst hospital around here. There are people half dying in the rooms and they have to wait 20 minutes or more just for a nurse to come in and assist them to the bathroom. Meanwhile, at the desk there’s got to be around 15 nurses standing around, talking and laughing. Did these people go to college to learn this? WELCOME TO THE SEVENTH FLOOR: As I walk into the front entrance, it’s not too bad. I step into the elevator, at one point there were many people in there with me. I was clear in the back, things were tight. I began to feel claustrophobic. As I stand there I think to myself “this elevator is used so many times, by so many people each day and each night...” as it makes screeching noises and the door takes what seems forever to close. “what if it breaks down and I am left to die with these strangers?” Then the elevator door opens, at last I am free. Almost. I begin walking across the floor, the 7th floor. As I breathe in I smell this awful smell, it sickens me. As my mother tells me “they are all on antibiotics” as I say to her “I don’t think I should be sick and on this floor with all these people with upper respiratory problems.” I breathe in, I can barely breathe. I bring my sleeve to my face and breathe through it, hoping that some how, some way it’s better than the air around me that I am to breathe. Finally, we walk into the room to visit the person who we came to this place for. I look to the bed and I see a puffed, older, pained version of the kind lady who used to take care of me everyday my mother went off to work. The woman who played with me, taught me, fed me, taught me how to take a shower and not be scared I would drown. The woman who helped me trick my mom as I hobbled on crutches when she came to pick me up. (which she never fell for) The woman who wrote on me with eyeliner telling me that baby snakes were going to come out of me. A few of my childhood memories come back to me as I look at her with tears in my eyes. My Grammy. I hate seeing her in this pain, but mom gives me no choice, I have to come. You’re laying in the hospital bed. In so much pain, wishing you were dead. It’s hard to say and it’s hard to think. I wish I knew what was going through your brain, as you lay there with needles in your veins. Your skin looks as if it hurts, It looks like if it were touched, it would break. Your pain comes in spurts, your life, you want God to take. Laying in your hospital bed, wishing you were dead. Go up to heaven and share Gods holy bread. No one likes to see you like this, And you know that you’ll be missed. You’ve tried so hard, For far too long. Living. Barely. With all of this pain, if it were me, I couldn’t last one day. For just this, I admire you. You are my Grammy and I Love You.