Hospitals are just cities in soft shoes. The traffic’s slower, but it never stops, and no one’s indicating.
I’ve been spending more time in hospital lately. Not as a patient, just visiting. One of those stretches that creeps from the odd evening to most days of the week, until you start recognising the vending machine repair guy and knowing which café has the strong tea.
When you’re in that long enough, not in crisis, not in control, just there, you start to notice things. Patterns. Flows. Familiar strangers in uniforms. The way the place moves. And what struck me, more than anything, is that hospitals are just another kind of traffic system.
A city of motion. Only instead of horns and headlights, it’s rubber soles and trolley wheels.
There’s a certain choreography to it all. You can tell the staff from the visitors within two seconds. The staff move with purpose, straight lines, no hesitation. They walk like they’ve already made three decisions you haven’t caught up with. The visitors, on the other hand, have the vacant, circular gait of someone trying to decode signage while remembering where they left their coat.
The trolleys are everywhere. Cleaning trolleys, food trolleys, medicine trolleys, mystery trolleys with wires and tubes, each with its own destination and driver. You learn to press yourself into the wall when they pass, like giving way to a wide load on a country road. Some glide like they’re on rails. Others rattle like someone’s wheeling an entire biscuit tin collection across cobblestones.
At one point I found myself stuck behind a particularly slow-moving food trolley. The staff member piloting it had the patient calm of someone who’d long stopped caring about being in anyone’s way. She caught my eye, gave me a nod that said, This is happening. Accept it. I did.
Doctors appear like mopeds, fast, sudden, slightly alarming in how they cut through the flow without a glance. You blink and they’re gone. Porters, on the other hand, are like the big lorries. Moving beds, wheeling people, turning wide around corners. One reversed an entire hospital bed down a corridor with the kind of precision I’d trust on a double-decker.
And then there’s the nurses. Not flashy. Not loud. But everywhere. Doing ten things at once with an ease that makes you feel both useless and comforted. They’re the ones keeping it all together. Like the good cyclists on the road, quick, competent, dodging hazards while keeping the rest of us safe.
I nearly got run over by a blood pressure monitor on wheels. Just saying. No brakes. No warning. I stepped aside into a linen trolley.
You’d think all this chaos would feel overwhelming. But it doesn’t. It runs. Somehow. Quietly. Like the good days in traffic, when everyone’s alert, no one’s faffing, and the flow just… works.
The longer I spent there, the more I started seeing the place like one big route. Constant movement. People boarding and alighting, so to speak. Waiting at invisible stops. Hoping for good news. Bracing for something else. Everyone on their own journey, but part of the same loop.
And in the middle of it all: the staff. Calm. Sharp. Moving around obstacles with grace, making time where there is none, doing things that matter in places we usually try not to look too closely at.
So no, I haven’t been behind the wheel much lately. But I’ve still been watching traffic.
And it’s given me a new kind of respect for the people who keep things moving, even without a steering wheel.
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Meta description: Hospital corridors seen through a bus driver’s eyes: trolleys, traffic, quiet urgency, and staff who keep it all moving.
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