Coming home from the hospital after a long stay is like being a stranger in your own home. Everything around you is familiar and safe, but it doesn’t feel like home. The bed is too big, the room too quiet, the world too vast in contrast to the 10′ x 10′ room you have inhabited for the past two weeks. The warmth of the world is too hot and burns your skin. The ghost of an I.V. cord attaching you to the hospital remains, making you feel like at any moment the cord will snap and pull you into your rightful place of a hospital bed and four-o’-clock-in-the-morning vital signs. 
The absence of beeping is almost unnerving, and the realization that no one is waiting outside your door to make sure you’re still alive and breathing is more terrifying than we would like to admit. For the past two weeks, the world has simply been a passing thing that I watch from my window. Time has become like a distant cousin I’ve never actually met but hear of now and then. The hospital is another world, complete with it’s own set of rules and codes and levels of social hierarchy.
When a person experiences culture shock moving from, let’s say, LA to Mongolia, we all expect it and allow the person space to adjust to this odd new world they have taken on. But, when you’re discharged from the 
hospital and slung back into this world of dates and times and talk of future, everyone expects you to just fall back into it like you haven’t been locked in a totally different universe for the past few weeks. Some grace period is needed before we can become well-oiled cogs in the system again. It’s always hard to explain to people that my lack of jumping up and down in my room and smelling every flower on my block the moment I get home isn’t from lack of excitement but from a state of being overwhelmed.
Of course, the moment it does hit you that you’re free, that you could go running wild and free into the ocean if you so wished without worrying about your I.V. getting wet or your heart rate getting too high and triggering an alarm, that the weight is off of you and the chords detached; that’s when you realize that you are, in fact, home, and home is where you want to be.
