The Art of Children's Hospital

A friend of mine once surmised that hospitals are depressing because they are generally painted in browns and mauves and don't have any art on the walls. I agree with her.

But hospitals have changed. The one I am sitting in now, a Children's Hospital, is so brightly colored and has so much of all sorts of art that it is hard to tell that it is a hospital at all.

There are giraffe and zebra statues in the halls, giant fish tanks, a choo choo train on tracks in one corridor, and a huge Native American-inspired representation of an Orca, a sculpture measuring approximately 25 feet in length (life-size) and so heavy that it is suspended from the ceiling on thick metal cables. There are rocket ships and stylized balloons and an entire jungle creation in the radiology suites.

The idea, I suppose, is to help children forget they are patients in a hospital, or perhaps, help their visitors forget this. The relative success of the decor could be argued, but at least it is not a drab environment.

For me, however, Children's is a sobering and humbling experience. There is nowhere else I can spend time that makes me feel as fortunate to have the child I have, despite his relative disabilities and chronic illness. No matter how bad things have gotten for him and for us together, when we are here I do not feel as if things for us have been so bad, so depressing.

But it isn't the art or the colors that does this. It is the children in wheelchairs, the horribly disfigured children, the ones without hair, without limbs, with all manner of bodily insult, deprivation, chronic illness, life-threatening illness and injuries, and the sullen and depressed faces of their parents and visitors that helps me realize how good my son's life is and how good our life together is.

I know this is an odd observation, but who doesn't feel at least a little better when they realize they are not the worst off?