Hospital Gowns

Among the humiliations inflicted on hospitalized patients are the short-sleeved gowns that they must wear. These are fastened in the back, with ties at the side and sometimes around the neck, and most of them look as if they’ve been rescued from a dump truck. The oldest ones create the holes for the arms and neck when you bring together a series of metal snaps, which require a mechanical engineering degree to figure out. Some gowns are torn and some have a tie missing. Clean gowns are provided every day, but even the best of them make me look terrible. Ordinary clothing disguises some of my physical defects, but these are painfully apparent in even the newest hospital gown.

If that’s the case, why don’t I bring my own nightshirt to the hospital? I once did just that when I went into the hospital for an operation. The evening before, in preparation for the surgigcal procedure, I drank two quarts of a horrible liquid and then was given an enema, after which I fell into a coma, never to be explained, that lasted for several hours. Before being rushed to an MRI of my brain, the nurses ripped off my nightshirt in an effort to revive me, and so I lost that nightshirt forever.

I had bought two of them, both in a fine cotton, both with what I viewed as a subtle, handsome, masculine design, and I was fond of them. And while I don’t look my best in a nightshirt, these were minimally damaging to my appearance. Obviously, the ruination of a nightshirt in the course of a lifesaving maneuver hardly matters. But stupidly it does matter. I still mourn its loss, for I lost the surviving nightshirt a few years later. I left that one on the back of a bathroom door when I checked out of an Italian hotel. I’ve never seen another one I liked as much as those. So in the half dozen or so hospitalizations that followed, I left my nightclothes at home. I’d rather look like a scarecrow than lose another nightshirt.

Of course hospital gowns are more practical than pajamas or nightshirts, for they permit easier access to those parts of you that must be prodded, poked, and pricked. Also, if you’re bleeding, as I was during my last confinement, you don’t want blood all over your own garment. But the hospital gowns have another function as well. They are one way in which the institution depersonalizes its inmates, all now dressed alike, as if they were soldiers or prison inmates. Such blows to the patients’ autonomy make it easier to control and regulate their lives in the hospital. It’s just something you have to put up with, along with all the other indignities imposed by a hospital stay. After all, if a hospital stay keeps you vertical, it’s worth the temporary loss of autonomy and the ensuing assaults on your dignity and vanity. Still, I don’t have to like it.