I was working overnight in Tiny Memorial Hospital, located in scenic rural America.  My call room there was a converted patient room.  As such, my bed was a hospital bed.  Lying there one night, I rolled to the side and raised the head of the bed using the button on the rail.  The blanket was standard hospital fare: stiff and thin.  And the television remote, fully two pounds and connected to the television by cable, was the latest NASA technology from about 1965.  I contemplated my surroundings, and noticed the nurse call button on the remote.  And I had a strange desire for Jello and my old cardigan, but I shook it off.

I began to imagine what it was like for the older patients in the facility.  And what it would be like for me one day, when I might be hospitalized or placed in a nursing home.  Admittedly, given my tendency to run my mouth and forget the contents of my carry-on, I’m probably more likely to be tasered to death in an airport in my late 80s, or 50s.  But one wonders about the future.

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Edwin Leap is an emergency physician who blogs at edwinleap.com and is the author of The Practice Test. This article originally appeared in Emergency Medicine News.