cardboard wonder

There are some things I take for granted. Until today, I didn't realize that the act of flattening cardboard boxes was one of them.

I was sitting at the desk with my back to the patients today when I heard a woman exclaim in surprise. I turned around, expecting to see something dramatic, but all that met my eyes was Lindsay, who was in the middle of putting away the supplies that had just been delivered from the hold. She held in her hands a flattened cardboard box, and the patient in Bed 9 looked like she was about to faint from the sheer wonder of it all.

We started laughing, and Lindsay slowly pushed the box back into its original form, folding the tabs back together to make the square. Eugenie, the lady in Bed 9, stared, her eyes as wide as the moon. She shook her head and looked to her neighbours for support. Robbed totally of speech in her amazement, she asked with quick, birdlike gestures of her wrinkled hands whether they had ever seen something so incredible.

By now, the patient in Bed 8 had started to giggle. She, apparently, had seen this trick before and wasn't quite so flabbergasted. But Eugenie was still totally mesmerized, so Lindsay flatted and re-folded the box several more times while the little old lady's astonishment grew by leaps and bounds.

We couldn't keep something like this to ourselves, naturally, so we called another one of our friends over from the other ward to join in the fun. By this point, unfortunately, Eugenie had had about as much of the magical box as her little old heart could handle. As soon as she saw Lindsay coming with her big square of cardboard, she laid herself flat down and pulled the covers tightly over her head, only re-emerging when she was certain the danger was past.

We figured maybe she just needed to start out small, to overcome her new fear of magical boxes, so I scrounged up the smallest little container I could find. I brought it to her bedside like a peace offering, planning to show her that, indeed, she too could flatten and re-fold boxes. She grabbed it from my hand, and smacked me with it. And then she threw it across the room. Eugenie, it would appear, was having none of it.

So I put it on my head like a hat and minced back and forth in front of her bed until her reluctant laugh sounded through the ward and she didn't look quite so scared or quite so amazed, but just like herself again, her white, woolly hair resting on her pillow.

At which point we discovered that, somewhere in the midst of all the fun, one of Lindsay's other patients had gotten dressed and hopped in a car headed for the Hospitality Center without having heard a word of the discharge instructions she needed.

But it's okay. She, along with four or five other ladies will come back in the morning. Because tomorrow they dance.

For today, we're just going to work on the box thing.