A Walk Around the 10th Floor

I spent a long time in a hospital recently. I can't remember if it was last week or the one before, and I can't remember how long I was there, but I haven't yet opened my May Elle so let's say I was there for a substantial amount of time. Hospitals are seafoam green, smell nice, energetic and lethargic at the same time. They are questionable, and rarely have the answers you're looking for. Hospitals are unpadded, they are ripe but they are stale. These are all the things that hospitals are... There is one thing they are definitely not: fashionable.
The closest you can come to contemporary in a hospital is a newborn baby. The butt-gowns and booties go without saying, but the ice cream cone-printed nurse blouses (where do they GET those? Ugly print surplus stores?) and ever-recurring ponytails are memorable to me. I counted more pairs of Crocs than I do during an average mid-summer four-day trip to Disneyland. Nurses dress to be thrown up on, surgeons dress to be splattered upon (sorry). And the sad fashion choices do not stop at the employees: people who visit hospitals do not dress to impress, for they are visiting someone who will probably not be able to see the outline of their body, let alone notice a madras headband. I don't blame them all for dressing like this, but it is a little draining to see all that insipid clothing for a week.
But alas! When I was able to walk down the hall, I walked further in my head than anybody knew- I had seen inspiration! At long last, a memorable trip around the 10th floor left me with a tiny candle flame of hope. There was another world out there, one in which people went to meetings in Prada pants and lunches in Earnest Sewn jeans, and here I had a window to it. I rounded a corner, leaning on my mom's arm and pushing my IV drip in front of me (my mom lugging my drainage bucket), and saw another mother-daughter duo, in a much more forgiving scene: sitting on the floor of the hallway, outside their own family member's room, the two women (we'll say 55 and 25) were engaged in quiet and serious conversation, which is basically the only type of conversation you come across in a hospital. My eyes lit up (okay, they returned to their proper place of openness) upon the sight of their styled hair, and further widened after I noticed their jackets. These women were put-together, they had actually dressed this morning. They were stylish and authoritative, and they reeked of self-assurance and stability. I wanted to crawl into their world, the world from which I come, and never crawl back into my squealing hospital bed.
The most happy moment came, however, when I caught a glimmer of what was in the daughter's open leather purse: a Superfood Odwalla juice and a banana peeked out and said hello to me, welcoming me back, when I was ready, into the healthy land from which they came. This daughter was me in ten years: in a hospital (ha), dressed for a San Francisco afternoon, wielding nutrients.