Down in the Dungeons

Note: This was a story I started when I was still working as a social worker and did evaluations in peoples' homes and the hospital.

Today, I had to go to the hospital to do evaluations on patients. I go there maybe two times a year since I do evaluations out in the community, not at the hospital.

I had never gone to the hospital alone. And I go maybe once a year when they need help. And there I went by myself; lost, lonely and confused you might say wandering around in a hospital basement through winding curves and passageways looking for a 5 by 5 foot office room which was supposedly next to the basement morgue.

When I first arrived at the hospital I asked the receptionist how to get to the office.

She gave me a strange look and said, "Oh boy, follow this hallway all around, go down to the basement and it's a quarter mile."

"A quarter mile!" I said. "In a basement!"

I knew for sure I would end up lost, in a hospital basement no less, and in a hospital basement with a morgue. And with a quarter mile to roam about, I could be lost for days.

I walked past ceilings with metal tubing, walls covered in tarp obviously being built or fixed, I even passed the morgue. And instead of remembering all of the Stephen King movies I shouldn't have watched when I passed by with the ghosts, zombies and the like; I thought about the people who were lying inside who had passed away, and even though I knew they weren't spiritually still there, I felt an overwhelming loneliness for them as I walked by.

(And that's where the story ended.)