Hospitals: Home or Hellscape?

Hospitals have always been strange places for me.

As a child, they represented safety and comfort. I knew I would be taken care of. I knew the people there cared. And most of the time, when I left, I felt better than when I entered.

The smells, the sights, the routines—they represented security, especially while living with lifelong medical challenges. I felt so safe in hospitals that, for a long time, I believed I wanted to become a medical professional working in one.

You should love your place of work, right?

But as I changed, so did my relationship with hospitals.

As I got older, the smell of certain antiseptics began to cause anxiety. Certain lighting made me feel like I was back in an operating room. It was almost as if some of those memories had been stored somewhere deep within me, waiting to be triggered by a smell, a sound, or a hallway.

Still, those feelings were not enough to scare me away from the medical field.

The first time my fear of hospitals truly surfaced was during my three-week hospital stay before the birth of my son, Leo.

When I entered the hospital in July 2023, I did not realize how long those weeks would feel. At times, it felt like I may never leave. My body was struggling, and although I knew the doctors were trying to help me, I also knew they were placing me in difficult and dangerous waters in order to protect my son.

I felt terrible every day. Sick. Weak. Scared.

I was scared for myself, for my son, and for our future.

When Leo was born, those feelings did not immediately improve. I woke from surgery feeling like I was not going to make it. I had never felt so weak in my life. I remember waking up to my family standing around my bed with tears in their eyes and fear in their hearts.

Over the coming weeks, I began to heal.

But my son had to stay.

He was eleven weeks early and needed care I could not provide at home. I understood why he had to remain in the NICU, but that did not make it easier on my mother’s heart. I could not visit him as much as I wanted because I was still healing myself.

It was two months of hospital visits before he was finally able to come home.

As we drove away with him, I remember thinking:

I never want to see a hospital again.

As the weeks and years passed, I began to feel stress and concern with medical appointments, tests, and anything that required hospital visits.

That anxiety grew in 2025 when my leg began to swell without a clear reason. After two hospital stays, multiple tests, and several appointments, doctors still could not give me an answer or a solution. I had never doubted the medical system more, and that uncertainty only added to my growing anxiety around hospitals.

That continued when I went to Mayo Clinic—a facility I was not familiar with, in a state away from home and family. My anxiety around hospitals began to build alongside all the other unknowns.

I made it through surgery in April and believed I was finally done with hospitals for a while.

Then last month, my fears around hospitals changed again.

My sister spent weeks in the ICU fighting for her life. Each time I visited, my stomach would tighten and I would become nauseous. The fear returned, along with doubts, questions, and the helplessness that comes from watching someone you love suffer.

And then, on July 18th, she passed away.

The hospital became something different that day.

It became a place of death, grief, and despair.

In the past month, even driving past the hospital has brought anxiety and tears.

But before I could even begin to heal from that, my grandpa began experiencing serious medical concerns. Now, once again, we are back in hospitals—talking with doctors, waiting through tests, sitting in rooms filled with uncertainty.

Even as I write this, my grandpa is undergoing more medical testing.

And yet, despite all the concern and anxiety hospitals now bring me, I still feel more comfortable in that environment than I do in many others.

How can one place hold so many different emotions?

How can one building represent both safety and fear?

I have started to learn that hospitals are places of both healing and trauma.

Answers and uncertainty.

Beginnings and endings.

Places where people are both saved and lost.

For me, hospitals are not simply home or hellscape.

They are a bit of both.

Maybe hospitals are places where life becomes painfully clear—where we meet fear, hope, grief, love, and survival all in the same hallway.