(II) The Labyrinth Beckons - Part one

  

We arrived at the Canberra Hospital (hereinafter TCH) Accident and Emergency department around 10pm.  Carolie went directly to a ‘recovery and resuscitation’ unit, while I went to an adjacent family room, occupied by someone waiting news like me.  I had no idea what to expect.  For me the ‘emergency’ environment was a twilight zone.   

Large hospitals are akin to a labyrinth in many respects.  Endless well-lit corridors all look the same; in some areas, coloured lines painted on the floor lead off in many directions; signs with arrows bear no resemblance to your sense of the space; employees in similar garb wander the corridors with clear intent but little concern for your spatial befuddlement.  My heightened sensory awareness added to the ‘Alice reaching the bottom of a very deep well’ effect.

The two large public teaching hospitals we encountered in different cities evoked a sense of enclosure in a single labyrinthine abode, operating outside constraints of time and place.  Night and day are almost indistinguishable in emergency and intensive care spaces.  Discernible shifts in work rhythms and light intensities are the only indicators I noticed.  People come and go constantly without much notice.  An occasional interpolator acknowledges your existence briefly, moving quickly on to another engagement.   

After a while, you feel almost invisible, an observer in a large fish tank full of permanent players circling  relentlessly, in a continuous interplay with visitors who dart about anxiously or settle nervously, waiting for cues from the ‘players’.   As I later explored this environment I came upon dead ends after dutifully following signs; stairwells beckoned to nowhere; cavernous lifts would move up and down between floors that had few distinguishing features.  The easily distracted could find themselves searching for units, wards and rooms on the wrong floor. Alice again:

          There were doors all round the hall, but they were all locked;  and when Alice had been all the way down one side and up the other, trying every door, she walked sadly down the middle, wondering how she was ever to get out again.*

Long corridors with tributaries and large swing doors at regular intervals hide undiscovered territories through which only initiates may pass. New building developments merge with old stock in a strange conglomerate of differing materials and discordant spatial designs. This phenomenon was a pervasive element of the journey. 

Labyrinths can be transformative spaces, and have long held such a place in tales of magic quests and mythical lands.  They can also be forbidding and scary with nasty surprises lurking in corners.  They pop up in the lexicon of holistic healing, but sadly, ‘healing labyrinths’ are a phenomenon largely ignored by the scientific paradigm. 

Someone in circumstances like mine is under extreme duress; not knowing the fate of their beloved; unfamiliar with the space, procedures and the personnel involved.  You feel dislocated; everything is uncertain and no one has yet put your mind at ease.  It is otherworldly in many ways. 

To be continued.......

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*              Carroll, op. cit., p. 6