Today: Hospital Gowns, Law School, and Accidents

At the time of this writing, it has been almost ten years since I graduated from law school. That’s long enough to forget a lot of things, including many of my feelings about the day to day experience. I will say, however, that as I remember it, law school was generally a very happy time for our family. We didn’t have much in terms of means, but we had enough, we had good friends, we were centrally located between our families, and more than anything we had the promise of the future to motivate us. The older I get, the more I believe that true happiness is a function of hope and promise and less a function of the circumstances through which one is passing.

I sit here “festooned,” as it were, by a drafty hospital gown on a grey metal folding chair in a drab hospital room. It is a room like all hospital rooms I have visited—pink on grey cabinentry, stainless steel accents fluorescent light, hard laminate flooring—with one difference: I’m the one stuck in it. I do have company though. On the floor at my feet, ever bubbly, my vigilant chest drain chatters away. And of course, I feel inseparably connected to my new traveling companion: a half-inch diameter hose protruding from my side.

 

I suppose if I dwell on the situation too long, it might begin to feel a little like solitary confinement. But of course, that isn’t fair. The nurses visit me all the time, even in the middle of the night! No, life is good. In fact, this experience reminds me a little of law school.

The law school environment has a great deal to offer. The way I see it, if you surround yourself with distinguished professors and accomplished cohorts, you can’t help but have an exhilarating experience. Granted, at least in my case, that exhilaration mostly originated from the knowledge that I was in way over my head.

Even with all the "exhilaration," there were times in the middle of every semester where the coursework simply lost its luster. Yes, there comes a point, perhaps in any endeavor, where the days seem to roll indistinguishably together. No one can escape that, not even in the ivory tower. I’ve been feeling a little that way of late. I’m just itchin’ for a change, a move, a new challenge something to shake things up a little.

That brings me to Tom (not his true name), one of my closest friends in law school. (The fact that he chose to befriend me speaks volumes to his charity and kindness.) Anyway, Tom remains one of my favorite kind of people. Well-grounded in the faith, he shouldered heavy responsibilities in his ward while going to law school and raising a growing family. A life-long resident of Utah, Tom participated in a variety of hardy outdoor sports. He ran like a Carl Lewis. He was a backpacker, a mountain climber, and a skier of the telemark variety. With all that to keep his attention outside, Tom clearly preferred the outdoors to the classroom.

 

Not that he was a slouch academically. Tom consistently scored at the top of the class for all three years. He came to law school having pulled down a difficult degree in Philosophy. Very sharp in all respects.

 

Both Tom and I chose the Thinkpad A31.

The J. Rueben Clark Law School required that each student purchase a laptop. I suppose the administration expected that we would use the laptops to take notes and complete exams. As it happened, the year I began law school was the first year that the law school offered wireless internet throughout the building. Of course, this advent led to all sorts of unintended malarkey. People played online games and read the news. Some used instant messaging to slip answers to students getting grilled by the professors as part of the Socratic method.

Tom took school seriously and apart from reading the news occasionally left the interwebs alone. He did have one guilty pleasure, however. A true mountaineer at heart, Tom used Summitpost.org and the avalanche reports as a literal window to the outside world during class. Because the wireless could be a little spotty in the classrooms, Tom would open up a dozen or more instances of his browser each one focusing on a different peak, minimize the windows, and then—as if methodically eating an orange—slowly tick through each one over the 50-minute period.

 

The J. Reuben Clark Law School sits on the eastern edge of BYU’s campus. At least when I attended the school, Heritage Halls (on-campus housing for first-year students) was situated immediately to the north of the law school. A little farther up 900 E., still heading north, were Deseret Towers (long since gone and the married student housing). After that you’d come to the MTC and the Provo Temple.

Tom moved his family to the on-campus married housing part way through our law school experience. This made it possible for Tom to leave their white Buick LeSabre at home. Instead, Tom would coast his ill-fitting older mountain bike down the long sweeping hill from the Temple and married housing past Heritage Halls and onto the law school campus. Obviously, the trip home was a different kind of experience. After all, what goes down, must come up . . . ? 

So anyway, one day during our third year in the school, Tom came in looking a little more tired than usual and perhaps a little stiff. Out of habit, I asked him about his evening. He then proceeded to tell me how he had been hit by a car on the way home from school. Tom had been riding his bike past the Heritage Halls parking lot when a young, student plowed into him with her car. She hit him so hard that he rolled up on to the hood of the car and the bike was damaged.

I sat there completely dumbfounded. My jaw ajar, I looked at him trying to find any indication of trauma. Nothing. Tom wasn’t one to show emotion. He had a sheepish grin on his face when he told me, “All I could think, when she hit me, was ‘finally something exciting is happening to me!’” Words to live by from a wise man who has gone on to accomplish great things.

I’ve thought about those words a lot over the years. Today, as I sit in the hospital and stare out at the dripping soggy bleakness and contemplate another day of inactivity followed by a long recovery, it could be easy to mope a little. But I don’t feel that way. Yesterday, as the Urgent Care doctor—clearly enjoying something a little different—explained his diagnosis to a room full of nurses and two very engaged medic teams, Rachael turned to me and said: “Finally, something exciting is happening to us.”

 

And you know what? I was thinking the same thing. That is, at least before they carted me off to the A-car. Trouble is, I never thought to ask Tom—all those years ago—if “something exciting” was supposed to be a good thing or not.